Documentary AreaSimply the best Documentaries

How did Hitler decide he was a messiah and persuade a whole nation to follow him to damnation? This is a subject that has been mined many times in fiction - Raiders Of The Lost Ark, Constantine, Hellboy, Bulletproof Monk and English horror writer James Herbert's book The Spear - as well as documentary. Based on Ken Anderson's 1995 book of the same name, this aims to show how the Nazi party was originally made up of several occult groups that believed a messiah was on the way to save Germany.

Blue whales are the largest animals to ever live on earth, yet they are difficult to find or track. Even some of the locations where they birth their young are great secrets. Join some of the world's eminent blue whale scientists as they embark on a revolutionary mission to identify and tag California blue whales as they migrate to a spot known as the Costa Rica Dome. This incredible voyage yields unforgettable new footage and insight into these amazing creatures' lives. Scientists use DNA analysis, recordings of whale songs, homing devices, and sea dives to shed light on the blue whale's breeding and birthing habits

While scientists have previously theorised about a “Big Crunch” where the universe retracts back to its original size, the discovery of Dark Matter and Dark Energy has placed that hypothesis on the backburner. Some astronomers now believe that if Dark Matter offsets Dark Energy then as the universe slowly expands, stars will gradually fade, running out of fuel and leading to a dark, cold and lifeless universe. Others hypothesise a much more violent end where Dark Energy continues to expand the universe at a greater and greater speed. Stronger than gravity, Dark Energy would pull apart everything down to the fundamental particles – the universe’s very fibres. While the universe’s end may be 50 billion years away, great leaps in science will continue to alter how we believe the universe was formed – and how it will end.

The great apes which include chimps, orangutans, gorillas and bonobos, seem to have rich emotional lives similar to our own. But just how smart are these animals? A new generation of investigators are converging on an explanation for why the non-human great apes never made the breakthrough into an accelerating human-style culture that builds on the achievements of previous generations.

Famed astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson takes a tour of the Solar System and the known universe establishing the components of Earth's "address" within the Virgo Supercluster. He then shares the story of the person who championed an expansive understanding of Earth's place in the universe by presenting Renaissance Italian Giordano Bruno's vision of the universe as a limitless expanse of space and time. He then makes an exploration into the Cosmic Calendar, which dates back to the dawn of the Big Bang (similar to the presentation from episode 1 of the original series). The episode ends with deGrasse Tyson narrating how he met his mentor Carl Sagan, who hosted the first Cosmos series.

Open your eyes to the bizarre, ferocious and surprisingly beautiful world of the invertebrates, a ground-breaking exploration into a spectacular miniature universe never normally seen but teeming all around us. In the first episode, the story of the land-living invertebrates. Discover the private life of Europe's dramatic leopard slug, a common garden resident with a truly bizarre end to its marathon mating ritual; watches the courtship ballet of tiny springtails on the underside of a leaf; sees swarms of bright red South African millipedes find partners, and in the caves of Venezuela meets the giant bat-eating centipede.