In the spring of 1945,
Adolf Hitler retreated to the Fuhrerbunker,
16 metres below the streets of Berlin.
The Russian army was closing in on the German capital,
World War II was all but over.
But even in his last days, Hitler refused to accept defeat.
He continued to draw inspiration from the deeds of his hero,
a legendary German leader whose portrait was the only image
to adorn the walls of Hitler's private shelter -
Frederick the Great, the King of Prussia.
200 years earlier,
Frederick the Great had transformed Prussia
into a formidable military state.
In the 19th Century, it was this iron kingdom that would
create for the first time, a single unified Germany.
And in the 1930s,
Hitler fused the glorious history of this old Prussia
to his Nazi regime.
But this association would be a disaster for Frederick's reputation
and for the future of Prussia itself.
For there was another Prussia, and another Frederick.
Frederick the Great was also a self-styled philosopher king,
an intellectual heavyweight,
a talented musician, philosopher, historian and poet.
Frederick's Prussia was a beacon of enlightenment and culture,
and his life unfolded as an epic drama of scandal,
sacrifice and glory.
So how great was Frederick?
And how did this enlightened monarch
become an inspiration for the most repellent regime
in modern European history?
I want to rediscover Frederick the Great...
..to unravel the many lives of this extraordinary man,
and through his story,
to gain a deeper understanding of the enigma of Prussia.
The Kingdom of Prussia sprang from humble origins.
In the beginning, there was only Brandenburg.
Centred on the city of Berlin,
this would become Prussia's heartland.
But in the 17th Century, it was just one of literally
hundreds of separate German sovereignties.
Brandenburg was landlocked, it possessed no defensible geographical
frontiers, there were no rivers or mountain ranges on its boundaries,
it had poor soils over most of its extent
and had little in the way of natural resources.
This was an unpromising backwater.
Landlocked Brandenburg was similarly challenged geopolitically.
It was surrounded on all sides by predatory neighbouring powers.
What we have to understand about Brandenburg is its place on the geopolitical map of Europe.
Brandenburg was situated in a dangerous neighbourhood.
In the east, was the vast empire of Russia,
in the north,
Sweden -
one of the most powerful protagonists in the 17th century -
in the west,
France and in the south,
the sprawling empire of the Hapsburgs' Austria.
And sandy Brandenburg was in the no man's land
between these major European powers.
Deep in the bowels of Berlin Cathedral...
..lie the bones of the Hohenzollern dynasty.
This is the clan of Protestant noblemen that would lead
the transformation of modest Brandenburg into a European power.
By the close of the 17th Century,
they had acquired a collection of territories that stretched
like an uneven line of stepping stones across Central Europe.
This included on its Eastern frontier the Duchy of Prussia,
and after Frederick's grandfather was crowned king there,
all Hohenzollern lands became known as Prussia.
Yet the Kingdom remained geopolitically exposed
and nobody felt this inherent vulnerability
more acutely than Frederick William I.
Nicknamed the Soldier King,
he began to create a Prussian military machine.
Good news for Prussia,
bad news for his eldest son, the future Frederick the Great.
Bonsoir. Je suis...
Professeur, Docteur...? Clarke.
Clarke. Riding on your own horse.
Yes, I've left my horse outside. I hope that's OK?
It's better so.
We're in the Charlottenburg Palace,
built in 1701, and in the early part of the 18th Century,
this place became a major cultural centre.
Like many of his forbears, the Crown Prince Frederick
loved painting, music and literature, the arts of peace.
But the cultured prince was a grave disappointment to his authoritarian father.
Frederick William I, his father, wanted him to be a good soldier.
He had to be on horseback and he had to learn to shoot
and he had to learn discipline,
and Frederick was not really interested as a young boy in military things at all.
He started reading French books and tried to read Latin,
and he was not allowed to because his father hated French books and hated Latin,
and he had to do this in the night.
By the age of 16, the crown prince was leading a double life.
Outwardly he conformed to a gruelling regime imposed by his father,
but in secret,
he continued to pursue his artistic passions.
This was no ordinary teenage rebellion.
Frederick's rift with his father escalated
into a vicious psychodrama.
Sensing that his son was drifting away from him,
Frederick William became increasingly violent.
He frequently cuffed, slapped and humiliated the prince in public.
Frederick thought that his father hated him, and I think he was right.
And in my opinion he really, really hated his father.
This clash was nothing new in Hohenzollern family history,
but never before had the struggle between father and son
been waged with such emotionally and psychological intensity.
In 1730, fearing a rift with Austria,
the King blocked Frederick's proposed marriage to an English princess.
For the 18-year-old prince, this was the final straw.
He hatched a plan to run away to England to begin a new life in exile,
an act of high treason that scandalised the courts of Europe.
But the flight was a fiasco and, inevitably, Frederick was captured.
The King was incandescent with rage and here at Kustrin,
the site of a mighty Prussian fortress,
he has his own son thrown in jail.
Frederick was here for two months
from September 5th, and he was in a prison without an exit.
And at this time, Fredrick himself expected his own execution.
Do you think the King would actually have executed his own son? Is that conceivable?
I am quite sure.
But the King discovered that his son had an accomplice.
Hans Hermann von Katte, a dashing young officer,
had become the prince's closest friend,
and it was Katte who would suffer the full force of the King's fury.
Frederick's life would be spared.
Let's go to the spot where it must have been.
But the prince would be forced to witness
the gruesome spectacle of his friend's execution.
The execution was public, but especially it was a performance
for the crown prince who was in the castle. And the window was high.
Two servants had to hold Frederick...
..so he could see Katte passing the wall.
And there this last dialogue took place.
Prince: "Please, my dear Katte, forgive me what I do with you."
And Katte replied in French, of course,
"My prince, I would like to do this for you a thousand times."
And then he fainted.
Within three years of Katte's death,
resigned to his dynastic obligations as heir to the throne,
Frederick reluctantly agreed to marry an Austrian-approved bride.
But the trauma inflicted here at Kustrin
would forever shape this future king's personal and political character.
This was a man who threw up defences around himself,
he became a highly artificial person. A man of artifice -
not of deception, I don't think, but of dissimilation,
a man who became accustomed to playing a role.
He once said to an intimate friend that he felt he was a mirror
that dared not be what nature made it,
but was obliged always to reflect what was around it.
And this appalling, traumatic experience also had political ramifications.
It was the Austrians who had opposed the English marriage,
and it was the Austrians who advised King Frederick William I of Prussia
about the length of his son's imprisonment and, ultimately,
it was the Austrians who forced him to marry his wife -
she was an Austrian candidate, chosen by the Austrian court.
It would be seven years before Frederick could wreak his vengeance
upon Austria, a period in which the crown prince
would again astound the courts of Europe,
this time as a radical writer,
an intellectual heavyweight of the age of enlightenment.
The 18th Century was an era of enlightened monarchs - Charles III, Leopold II of Tuscany,
even to some extent Catherine of Russia - but none contributed
to the enlightenment as active cultural producers in the way that Frederick did.
And I think what that tells us is something about the seriousness of the philosophical side
of that curious double existence Frederick led,
the existence of a philosopher king.
Frederick's intellectual mentor
was none other than the French philosopher Voltaire,
the most celebrated mind of his age.
It was under Voltaire's direct tutelage that his royal apprentice
wrote and published this...
..a provocative essay in which, with remarkable eloquence,
the precocious young prince radically redefined the nature of kingship.
Well, this is extraordinary.
I'm holding Frederick the Great's Anti-Machiavel,
a treatise expressing his vision of a virtuous kingship in opposition
to Machiavelli's Prince, an essay which stressed the importance
of the quest for glory and riches.
In contrast to that, Frederick sets out a vision of kingship which is about sustaining the welfare
of the state, the happiness of one's subjects and so on.
And that's what I have in my hands here, the King's own manuscript in tiny beautiful handwriting.
It's really quite a remarkable thing.
"To gain the affection of the people and the great,
"it is necessary for a prince to be humane and gracious,
"to have a fund of probity and virtue,
"and to inspire confidence through wisdom."
The Anti-Machiavel was a ground-breaking work of political philosophy...
..a manifesto for all aspects of statecraft,
including a blueprint for war.
In May 1740, Frederick's father died.
His son announced his new reign with a spectacular act of vengeance and daring.
He unleashed war on the empire that had long overshadowed Prussia,
intimidated his father and inflicted such misery on Frederick himself -
Hapsburg, Austria.
In December 1740, just seven months into his reign,
Frederick amassed 27,000 troops on the banks of the River Oder.
Their objective, to invade and conquer Silesia,
the richest province of the Hapsburg Empire.
To the astonishment of all of Europe,
the philosopher king was waging war.
HE SPEAKS IN GERMAN
The decision to launch an unprovoked strike on Silesia
was taken by the King alone,
against all the advice of his military and diplomatic aides.
It was the single most important political act of Frederick's life.
"I've crossed the Rubicon," Frederick declared,
invoking the military exploits of none other than Julius Caesar.
Six weeks after crossing the River Oder, virtually all of rich Silesia,
including the Catholic capital Breslau, was in Prussian hands,
and Frederick had no intention of letting go.
Over the next five years,
Frederick fought and won two Silesian wars,
changing forever the balance of power in Central Europe.
"Never will Austria get over the pain of Silesia's loss,"
the King later reflected,
"Never will it forget it must now share its authority in Germany with us."
What astounded contemporaries about Frederick's Silesian adventure
was the formidable performance of the Prussian army.
All of Europe marvelled at the co-ordinated movement
of its infantry, advancing like moving walls.
Relentless, unstoppable,
an awesome weapon fashioned by Frederick's father.
Of course, this is the inheritance of the soldier scheme.
This is one of the qualities Frederick inherited from his father.
Frederick really preferred long, tall soldiers who had to be trained in
single movements like one battalion, as a single man moving like walls.
The underlying principle was keeping the soldiers in line, which may sound somewhat trivial.
But assembling a whole army of 30,000 to 40,000 soldiers
is only possible if each single man would do what was required.
During his Silesian campaigns, Frederick began to turn Prussia into a highly militarised state.
To his men "Fritz", as they affectionately called him,
was a fearless comrade who led from the front,
dressed in this plain blue uniform.
It's a simple officer's coat,
a shabby uniform, dirty,
full of stains to show, as a true philosopher,
that outward appearance means nothing.
"I'm the servant of Prussia,
"I'm the servant of the people
"and I do not allow myself a personal luxury."
This is about as close as we are going to get to the real Frederick, and there's something touching about
the sense of proximity you get when you are confronted with
an object so intimately associated with the person of this king.
I think it's worth thinking about the effect this jacket must have
had on the King's subjects and what I think it communicated to them
was that the man inside the uniform was in some ways less important than the uniform itself.
And this is where I think it becomes very psychologically interesting.
It's an act of self effacement, it's a refusal to be recognised
as an individual, and I think the roots of that self effacement lie very deep in this king's character.
The fact he grew up in an environment where he was absolutely forbidden
to be what he wanted to be, and I think that habit of self effacement stays with the King
throughout his life, and that's one reason why he feels comfortable in this anonymous, symbolic jacket.
In the first five years of his 46-year reign,
Frederick transformed and enlarged Prussia through war.
There now followed over a decade of peace...
..11 years in which the King's artistic life
blossomed at a beautiful summer palace
that came to embody Frederick's cultural world.
When Frederick the Great took over the throne in 1740, he had
the problem that in Potsdam there was only the city palace
and there was no garden, and it was so fashionable
in the mid-18th Century to have a garden to the palace that he was looking for a garden spot somewhere.
He found this little mountain, he bought it, and if you have a garden
you know you need a garden house somehow and this is, if you like, the beginning of Sanssouci.
It has only 12 rooms, so it's a little garden house.
The Palace of Sanssouci, French for "without a care,"
was an extraordinary cultural statement.
Here was a Prussian king whose palace was more French orangery than German castle,
and whose inner circle looked to France for its intellectual inspiration.
He invited friends, there were several philosophers and so on.
Most famous Voltaire, for example, who lived here for three years.
And they would come here for the day,
and then have discussion circles or dinners.
His idea of this place was to live between the real world
and the world he was dreaming of, I think.
Away from the bustle of the royal court in Berlin,
Sanssouci was Frederick's spiritual home,
and it was in the music room here
that he won a reputation as a prolific composer and gifted musician.
He probably could be considered one of the most competent amateur flute players there ever was.
All the composers at the court
wrote flute pieces and some were immensely difficult.
The ones he wrote for himself also contain quite difficult passages.
Even now, a flute player who could play all those materials
with ease would be a highly accomplished flute player.
So he was a highly accomplished player,
but why choose the flute? For a number of reasons.
Firstly, the flute has a long-standing association with military practice.
At the same time, it was an instrument that you could play with elegance and ease.
You would not find a king playing the trumpet for example, or the violin,
which involved too much contortion of the body. Secondly, the flute had been developed from the simpler
cylindrical instrument of the renaissance into this three piece, highly ornamented instrument
of the early 18th Century by French makers and players.
It was the French players who gave the flute
a sort of "elan" that it hadn't had before.
The highly acculturated milieu of Sanssouci
would become a recurrent theme in representations
of Frederick long after his death, but one person who didn't enjoy
the pleasures of the King's summer palace was his wife.
Frederick was married to Elisabeth Christine from Brunswick-Bevern
and she was not living here in Sanssouci - there was no space for her.
She was only once visiting this place and she saw there was no space for her and she left again.
There was not really love between Frederick and Christine.
They had no children,
she had her duties, he had his and that was it.
The King did not divorce his wife, banish her from the country or replace her with mistresses,
but he became notorious for the remarkable lack of feeling he displayed towards her,
leading contemporaries and historians alike to speculate about Frederick's sexuality.
It's nowadays often asked whether Frederick the Great was gay or not,
and it's a delicate question because gayness in the 18th Century means something...
Well, of course it means the same thing as nowadays, but it has a different importance, mainly
in this social level because at the court it would be interesting if someone else is from the same
social level, but not really if he is from this sex or the other sex.
So Frederick, he had partners,
"les favoris," he had men,
but he had to press his feelings under the carpet.
And so I think in the psychology of this king, of this man, it is a very important aspect to him.
Even in his most private domain, the most powerful man in the land
was once more the mirror that dared not be what nature made it.
Perhaps the closest expression of his true self we can hope to find is in his music.
For me, it's a music with sufficient profundity to say
that he was somebody who wrote from a true necessity to make music,
it wasn't just a pose.
The predominant affect is melancholy.
There are moments of almost choleric agitation.
Anger...sadness...passion,
as if he is overtaken by a moment of passion.
There's a sense that it was for him a genuine and truthful expression.
It was 11 years since Frederick had been to war,
but in January 1756, the King made a rare strategic blunder.
He was manoeuvred into an ill-judged alliance with the British
that alienated Prussia's powerful neighbours and plunged his kingdom into crisis.
This was a diplomatic disaster.
Prussia was now encircled by a mighty coalition comprising France, Austria and Russia.
Frederick faced the prospect of a war on three fronts,
a war that could threaten Prussia's very existence.
Frederick's reaction was characteristically decisive and typically do or die.
He packed his flute, saddled up his horse
and once again prepared his army to strike first.
In August, Frederick invaded Saxony,
the most powerful of Prussia's rival German states.
Taking Saxony would reduce the threat of an attack on Berlin,
but this was a high risk move.
Frederick's Prussia was plunged into its longest and bloodiest war.
The King would spend the next seven years on horseback,
riding thousands of miles,
commanding his armies and micro-managing his kingdom from the saddle.
Lose, and Prussia could be returned to its primordial condition
as a landlocked German backwater.
At eight o'clock in the morning on the 5th of November 1757,
Frederick stood in this very spot
on the morning of a great battle,
and across these fields stood 40,000 French and Austrian troops.
The Prussian army was outnumbered two to one.
Things had not been going well for the Prussians thus far,
but the Battle of Rossbach would prove a crucial turning point in the King's fortunes
In previous campaigns,
there had been little hint of Frederick's individual genius on the battlefield.
Oh, this is incredible.
But in what would become known as the Seven Years' War,
Fritz would prove to be Prussia's most potent weapon.
MAN SPEAKS GERMAN
OK, so this is the diorama of the Battle of Rossbach,
fought on the 5th of November 1757.
Nobody knows the Battle of Rossbach more intimately than Herr Wenzel.
So after a briefing from the master, let's see if I can explain.
So the French marched in a great arc behind these hills
and emerged into this space here.
You can see the French troops just here pushing forward.
When Frederick saw the French troops were trying to outflank his position,
he used one of the oldest tricks in the book - he faked a retreat.
The French fell for this trick hook, line and sinker and went into pursuit mode.
At this point, out of sight from the French positions,
the Prussians started bombarding the front of the French lines, the French cavalry.
And in that moment, 3,300 Prussian cavalrymen
pushed in and made its first attack.
At this point, two very bad things happened to the French.
The first is their forward-marching infantry columns are subjected to artillery fire.
That's bad enough.
But at that moment, the marching columns of Prussian infantry
close like the blades of a scissors,
cutting into the flanks of the French.
And this is really Frederick's doing.
Prussia's enemy was a coalition force of mixed nationalities,
its commanders speaking different languages,
its troops' loyalties divided.
But Frederick boasted a tightly-organised, highly-motivated,
beautifully-drilled army,
united behind a single inspirational leader.
Rossbach was Frederick's most important military victory.
The French columns were broken up and destroyed,
the day was decided in a matter of minutes.
The Prussians lost 500 men, the enemy lost 10,000
and, most important of all,
it's at Rossbach that Frederick emerged as a truly brilliant military commander.
After his victory at Rossbach,
Frederick rode over 200 miles east
to face the Austrians at Leuthen in Silesia.
Once again outnumbered by almost two to one,
the Prussians won a famous victory.
Leuthen would become the most celebrated battle of Frederick's life,
a triumph that would seal his place in history
as a military genius on a par with Caesar and Napoleon.
As the Prussians marched from the battlefield at Leuthen,
legend has it that a single soldier began to sing.
He was immediately joined by the entire host
in a spontaneous rendition of a famous hymn of thanksgiving,
known thereafter and to this very day as the Chorale Of Leuthen.
Napoleon later claimed that Frederick's achievement at the Battle of Leuthen alone
placed him among the greatest commanders of all time.
Nearly two centuries after the event,
the famous victory was dramatically re-enacted
in a Nazi propaganda film.
Long after his death, Frederick's epic victories
would become the stuff of legend.
But a gruelling war on three fronts stretched Prussia to its very limit,
and not even Frederick the Great was infallible.
In August 1759, Frederick arrived here in Kunersdorf
to face his greatest fear, the massive Russian army,
which had made it to within just 90km of Berlin.
Initially, Frederick's men overwhelmed the enemy,
but the King then made a critical mistake.
The Prussian king, who decided that we continue our attack,
he saw only the flat land.
There is a very deep valley, a deep depression.
This is the famous Kuhgrund. Kuhgrund.
In this direction, about 1km.
You have to go down and climb up,
but they have to order their lines before the next attack.
This ordering continues. The Russian fire was destructive for the army.
The attack was stopped because there was no army any more,
only a group of fleeing soldiers.
Kunersdorf was a disaster.
19,000 Prussian casualties, 6,000 of them dead on the field
and most of the Prussians who were killed were killed just here,
in the Kuhgrund, as they made their way towards the Russian lines.
The King himself had two horses shot from under him.
Musket balls tore holes in his jacket.
One of which was deflected by the King's snuffbox.
A letter he wrote that evening to one of his ministers captures a sense of the King's despair.
"A cruel reverse," he wrote.
"I shall not survive it, everything is lost."
During the Seven Years' War,
Frederick won just 8 out of 16 major battles.
Kunersdorf was far from unique, but, remarkably,
the Russians failed to capitalise. Frederick held out
and Prussia fought on for another five years,
its resilience personified by a notorious class of loyal warriors.
In order to understand the success of Frederick's military machine,
we need to understand the ethos and culture of the noble class who ran it, the Prussian Junkers.
In Frederick's view, the Junkers, Prussia's conservative land-owning nobility,
were the only group capable of serving as officers in the military.
As such, they enjoyed a unique relationship with the Prussian state.
Hello, please come in!
And the Kleists are one of the oldest of these Prussian noble families.
It's sometimes said that the officer class and the Prussian nobility
are essentially the same thing. Is that true?
It is true that under Frederick's guidance,
in those days, most of the higher ranking officers
were noblemen.
Only the eldest son inherits the estate and the younger sons have to go.
So they served as civil servants or officers,
and created a so-called Dienstadel.
A service nobility.
Service nobility.
And it was a question of honour to serve le Roi de Prusse.
And of course the King has this view that only the nobility had a true honour code,
and therefore only the nobility was fitted for service in an officer role.
That was the idea of Frederick's father.
He invented, so to speak, a code of honour,
and the young Frederick the Great was very intelligent to use it.
It all belongs to the militarisation of the whole country.
Frederick the Great concentrated the whole country on his military ideas.
And I feel that it is not only the Frederick times,
but a general Prussian feeling, a feeling that we do something for our fatherland.
During Frederick's military campaigns, 1,500 officers died,
a toll concentrated on a small group of noble families.
This collective loss of its young men
earned the Junkers a powerful and permanent bond with the state.
Their values became a defining feature of successive Prussian regimes in war and in peace.
Of course, this nobility internalised military service
as a way of life, according a high esteem to military virtues,
such as courage, loyalty and discipline.
But it's important to remember militarism and bellicosity - militarism and warmongering -
are not the same thing. Prussia was not a warmongering state during the reign of Frederick the Great.
In fact, it spent less time at war than any of the other major European powers.
Loyalty alone wasn't enough to win the Seven Years' War,
but the patriotic resilience of his army
did buy Frederick just enough time to prevail.
Ultimately he was saved by a stroke of luck.
In 1762, with Prussia's forces all but spent,
Tsarina Elizabeth, ruler of Russia, died.
Her passing was celebrated in Berlin as the Miracle of Brandenburg.
Her successor, Grand Duke Peter, was an ardent admirer of Frederick.
Russia's days in the anti-coalition were numbered,
the Seven Years' War would soon be over
and its end inaugurated 23 years of peaceful Frederician rule.
In the second half of his reign,
diplomacy, Realpolitik and the first partition of Poland
would bring Frederick more new territory than he'd gained through war.
At home, he worked tirelessly to build the progressive state he had outlined in the Anti-Machiavel,
a vision that survives today in the architecture at the very centre of Berlin.
Frederick had initially intended that this square
should be a bog-standard, European residential square.
That meant at one end there'd be a palace
and then extending from each wing, a royal opera house and a royal library.
But what Frederick did was something completely radical.
He subtracted the palace from this ensemble and instead, you had an opera on one side,
a free-standing library opposite and over in the corner, St Hedwig's Cathedral.
Work on this cathedral began in 1745,
after the King got back from the Silesian Wars
and St Hedwig was the patron saint of Silesia.
This was to be a cathedral for the Catholic subjects of a Protestant kingdom.
It was one thing to tolerate the existence of a religious minority
within the borders of your kingdom - that was not uncommon in 18th century Europe -
but to establish a building like this
as a projection of tolerance, as a value in its own right,
that was a highly distinctive and unusual gesture.
In characteristic, absolutist fashion,
the King intervened personally in every area of state policy,
public education the civil service, law,
agriculture, trade and industry.
SHE SPEAKS GERMAN
Conceived during his last years and published in 1794,
eight years after his death,
this is perhaps Frederick's greatest domestic achievement.
A comprehensive law code which redefined the relationship between the monarchy and the state.
The law code envisaged a world of free citizens,
in which the state was sovereign and kings and governments were bound by law.
Almost 20,000 paragraphs legislate for every conceivable transaction
between one Prussian and another.
Before there was a general law code,
the law was embodied in an endless plethora of edicts and decrees.
With a law code, suddenly you had transparency, you had glasnost.
Frederick's achievements made him a cult figure throughout Europe,
but the King himself shunned personal adulation.
In his last 20 years, he withdrew almost entirely from his capital.
A cranky old man, most likely to be glimpsed
walking his beloved greyhounds at Sanssouci.
With the exception of a few coins and medallions,
this is the only image which Frederick of Prussia
deliberately propagated of himself
and it's a portrait by Johann Heinrich Christoph Francke.
The King shown here as not a glorious or powerful figure.
He's effectively an old man, we see a tired old man.
He turns towards us, a face bearing all the marks of age.
Cheeks are sunken, lips have fallen, he has clearly lost all his teeth.
It really is remarkable that it's by this image
that this king wanted to be remembered.
What it really is is a fascinating document
which I think captures the King's sense of who he himself was.
He perceived himself, I think, as a man whose energies had been consumed
by long years of war and long years of work
for his subjects, for his kingdom, for the Prussian state.
Frederick the Great died aged 74
in his armchair on 17th August 1786.
He had built a progressive, cultured and militarised state.
There was no enigma.
We're surrounded by what are often called the arts of peace,
and it might seem impossible to imagine
that the man who led his armies is also the man who designed
and financed this extraordinary palace of Sanssouci.
Is this a paradox?
I don't think so. It certainly was not a paradox for Frederick.
For Frederick it was all part of this sort of Gesamtkunstwerk,
the total work of art that was in his life.
He was an intensely aesthetic man who thought through everything that he did
in an aesthetic as well as a political and philosophical way.
This cultivation of the arts, of music,
of conversation, of philosophy and of reasoned, rational state craft,
they were all cut from one cloth.
There was no paradox here between the Frederick who played the flute and the Frederick who led armies.
These two worlds flow together in Frederick's existence
and become one, the contradiction is dissolved.
Most young Germans know next to nothing of Frederick the Great.
Even here in Berlin, where the echoes of his memory are everywhere.
You don't have to look too hard to find Frederick's presence in the German capital today.
But among the people, he's a distant, largely forgotten figure,
the memory of his deeds buried by the sheer scale and weight
of Germany's subsequent triumphs and traumas.
In the late 19th century,
Prussia rose under the leadership of Otto von Bismarck
to become the political heartland of a single German nation.
A Hohenzollern descendant of Frederick's family, Kaiser Wilhelm II,
led this unified Germany into the horrors of World War One.
But it was in the 1930s that Frederick the Great's Prussia
would be most emphatically appropriated as a model for the future of Germany.
It's difficult to imagine today,
but this was once the site of Potsdam's garrison church.
Built in 1735 by Frederick's father, Frederick William I,
the so-called "Soldier-King",
it was an eloquent statement of Prussia's military identity.
In March 1933,
this was the setting for a dramatic propaganda spectacle known as the Day of Potsdam.
As Adolf Hitler proclaimed the inauguration of the Third Reich,
wreaths were laid on the tombs of Frederick and his father
and the church resounded to the familiar strains of the Leuthen Chorale.
The purpose of the Day of Potsdam was to anchor the Hitler regime in Prussian history.
It proclaimed the fusion of the old Prussia and the new Germany.
In the same year as the Day of Potsdam,
Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda chief,
began to take control of the German film studio UFA.
Goebbels would raise the Nazification of Frederick's Prussia to a fine art.
For German cinemagoers in the 1930s,
Otto Gebuhr was Frederick the Great,
and in films such as Der Grosse Konig, The Great King,
Goebbels turned his Frederick into a prototype for Hitler.
What do you think these depictions tell us
about Hitler's attitude to Frederick the Great?
First of all, it's so directly to parallel Frederick with Hitler.
This only man, this single man, einsam...
Alone? Alone. Solitary.
Having responsibility for these things, this single man deciding everything.
That's the thing which fits to Hitler.
Hitler himself always tried to find parallels in some mystic way,
that the fate which was with Frederick will also be with him.
One thing that's very remarkable about this film
is that various characters make reproaches to the King,
which are the kinds of complaints and reproaches that many Germans were tempted to make of Hitler.
They say, "You've dragged us into a war needlessly, you've sacrificed the welfare of the people."
You spoil everything, you kill the people.
I think this is a very intelligent way of doing propaganda and the idea is,
"OK, if we, the system, which shows you this movie
"already knows about it, all these questions, we know the answers, too.
"We know what you think."
It gives them Glaubwrdigkeit.
It gives them credibility. Credibility.
Frederick the Great won the war and so now Hitler might also,
so don't be afraid that we have too many enemies.
To equate Hitler with Frederick the Great,
Nazi Germany with Prussia is a ludicrous perversion of history.
The idea that one of Europe's most enlightened and gifted monarchs
pre-figured one of the most repellent dictators in modern history
is simply absurd.
But during the final stages of World War Two,
as his downfall became inevitable,
Hitler's identification with the Prussian king steadily intensified.
The minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, had a very, very big influence.
Goebbels used to read the personal papers
and the letters of Frederick the Great, so he could say to Hitler,
"Oh, it's exactly your situation and he reacted exactly like you,"
and he gave an imagination that Hitler should think,
"Oh, I am very near to Frederick
"and if I am very near, I will win the war maybe."
In the Seven Years' War, Frederick had been saved by the death of the Russian Tsarina,
the Miracle of Brandenburg,
and in April 1945 it seemed that history was repeating itself.
'Aboard a special train, beginning the 24-hour trip back to Washington,
'the 31st President of the United States leaves Warm Springs forever.'
So tight was the grip of this historical romance
that the propaganda minister responded with elation
and even a sense of triumph
when he learnt the news of the death of the American President,
Franklin Roosevelt, on the 12th April 1945.
He put in the call to Hitler's apartment and said,
"Mein Fuhrer, I congratulate you, Roosevelt is dead, God has not abandoned us."
But this was pure fantasy.
Within a month of Roosevelt's death, Berlin was finally overrun by the Russians.
Germany was defeated.
It was the end for the Nazis and for Frederick's Prussia.
After the downfall, the reckoning.
The Allies identified Prussia as the very source of German militarism...
..an evil seed that had spawned two world wars and inspired Hitler.
Their retribution was swift and decisive.
On the 25th February 1947,
representations of the victorious powers - the United States,
the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union and France - met here,
in one of the few government buildings still standing in war-torn Berlin.
Their purpose was to discuss the Prussian problem and their solution was simple and shocking.
Prussia was to be abolished.
In that moment, the entire history of a great European state was cast onto the scrapheap.
The Nazi regime cast a long shadow over Germany's past.
But Frederick was too important to lie forgotten for long,
and 30 years ago, he was back in Berlin.
In 1980, the Communist government of East Germany
relocated this equestrian statue of Frederick the Great
to its original position here on Unter den Linden,
in the heart of was then East Berlin, the capital of the German Democratic Republic.
The statue had been removed from the centre of Berlin around the time the Berlin Wall went up in 1961.
At that time, Frederick was an unwelcome reminder of Germany's reactionary past.
But by 1980, things had changed and the Communists did a curious U-turn.
They reclaimed the King of Prussia as a socialist hero.
He was re-cast as a king of the beggars, a monarch with a social conscience.
Successive German regimes have found the urge
to reinvent this man in their own image irresistible.
They warped and distorted his memory.
But as we emerge from the shadows of the 20th century,
Frederick remains a man too great to ignore.
It's Frederick's brilliance and complexity
that put him among the great leaders of history.
Figures such as Caesar and Napoleon,
who, whatever we may choose to make of them,
so captured the spirit of their age
that it is impossible to imagine the past without them.
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