After the Germans defeated France,
their soldiers were sent to Paris for rest and recreation.
One of the soldiers on leave, is 19-year-old, Lieutenant August von Kageneck.
His unit did not take part in the French campaign.
He is visiting the city for the first time.
He writes:
We are given very strict instructions.
We must impeccably dressed, and avoid all contact with the population.
We're inventing mass tourism.
The French refuse to look at them.
Some, have started to fight back.
These two men who sabotage telephone lines
will be the first to be executed by the Germans.
The new French state, under the authoritarian rule of Maréchal Petain,
chooses to collaborate with Germany.
Petain promulgates a set of anti Jewish statutes
that excludes Jews from public life.
He and Hitler have shaken hands.
Everyday, the Wehrmacht parades.
The Germans occupy the capital cities of Europe
After Prague and Warsaw, Brussels, Luxemburg, The Hague,
Copenhagen, and Oslo,
but not London.
February 1941, in the suburbs of London.
Rose, who is only 3, has already lived through 2 years of war.
Timing & Viet by jdinic3@podnapisi English by godlob@IDWS
Rose is brave,
and bravery is called for in Britain.
3/6 Shock
Great Britain's cities had been devastated by German bombs.
But the country stands firm around Churchill
and with the providential aid of Roosevelt.
Roosevelt has just been re-elected for third term as President of the United States.
Though American opinion remain opposed to war, he declares
We must be the great arsenal of democracy.
Only part of the equipment he sends to Great Britain gets through.
Every British ship at sea is in a great danger.
The Atlantic ocean is crawled by the German submarines.
Their periscopes seek out British vessels.
Churchill is worried.
Soon, nothing will get through
and the outcome of the war seems uncertain.
Great Britain is an island, This is an advantage as well as a disadvantage.
But it is the best hope for the countries under occupation.
The German submarines, or U-boats, now have the French harbors at their disposals.
Grouped into packs, using torpedoes and cannons
These 'Wolves of the Atlantics' succeeded in sinking 4,000,000 tons of British shipping.
in 1941 alone.
Here, German submariners toss loafs of bread to a shipwrecked crew
who have almost no chance of surviving.
They will die of thirst, of hunger, of cold
or by choking on oil.
Hitler is delighted with the success of his submarines
but America's massive re-armament program worries him.
He tells his secretary, Bormann,
In one year, The United States will be ready to go to war.
If we are to face them, we need more war materials.
those materials are in the East.
We need to conquer that 'Living Space'.
then, Britain will lose all hope, and make peace,
and it will be too late for the Americans.
Let us attack Russia as soon as possible.
Hitler codenamed the plan "Operation Barbarossa"
after the medieval emperor, Frederick Barbarossa.
The Wehrmacht started to concentrate its troop in the East.
Lieutenant von Kageneck leaves for Poland.
Polish prisoners and Jews have been put to work in various construction projects.
Hitler wants to build a motorway across Poland
in order to move his army over to the new border of the Russia.
This is where the 9th Panzer Division is installed
along with von Kageneck's regiment.
He writes:
Next to us is an SS youth.
The commander asks: - Do you want to see a Jew?
He makes a sign and a soldier brings over a little man.
How many people have you been stolen from today?
The man doesn't reply.
Beat him 10 times with the stick
We were appalled. So this is our occupation of Poland?
We had heard fake stories of cruelty,
but it was impossible to know what was really going on.
This country has become the country of silence.
We didn't know that this was the beginning of the genocide
to which we will lend our hands and our courage.
Hitler diverse his plans for an offensive in the East.
He has to help out his ally, Mussolini
who wants to fight his own separate war.
Il Duce has just been routed by British in Africa.
The Italian army is in disarray in the desert.
To rescue Mussolini from disaster
Hitler dispatches one of his best generals over to Libya.
General Rommel, along with his armored division. The Afrikakorp
In Germany, Rommel is a big hero.
He is the man who took Cambrai, Arras, Rouen and Cherbourg in May and June of 1940.
And he is a true Nazi.
a devotee who has served Hitler with great zeal and efficiency from the very beginning.
Rommel believes in tanks and in a 'lightning war'.
He quickly orders the Afrikakorp to set off to the British position.
Rommel is already making a name for himself.
The British circulated his picture with the description, "This man is dangerous."
Hitler attacks Greece, the country that Mussolini has already tried to take
After his 'blitzkrieg' in the Balkans and his occupation over the Yugoslavia.
He drops his paratroopers over Crete.
Hitler has secured his southern flank for the invasion of Russia
but he lost precious time.
Operation Barbarossa has been delayed for several weeks.
A grand military parade is traditionally held in Moscow's Red Square
to celebrate International Workers Day.
Special preparations have gone into this one, however,
Stalin wants to make a big impression on the Germans.
He's been receiving information from his spies warning of the imminence of an attack.
But he finds it hard to believe that Hitler
would dare to break German-Soviet Non-aggression Pact, so soon.
The Germans are attending the parade,
and Marshall Timoshenko, The People Commissar and Stalin's Defense Minister
seems to salute them with great respect.
Hitler is ready to attack
but he wants to avoid fighting on 2 fronts.
He would like to make peace with Great Britain first.
In the suburb of London, in a house that has been spared from the German bombs
Rose is helping her parents who is listening to the radio.
Suddenly, an astonishing announcement comes over the BBC.
In Scotland, near Glasgow, the remains of a German plane
Messerschmitt 110 has been found.
Its pilot bailed out by parachute.
He turned out to be a top-ranked Nazi
Hitler's deputy, Rudolf Hess.
He says:
I have come in a mission of peace.
Hess was one of Hitler first supporters
and he is one of the most fanatical.
The Party is Hitler
Hitler is Germany Germany is Hitler!
Hess feels that the role he has played is not being as glorious as that of other Nazi leaders.
He wants to prove to his Fuhrer, that he, Rudolf Hess, is the only person
capable of finding a way out of the conflict with Great Britain.
But he is immediately locked up.
Churchill rejects his overtures, and Hitler disowns him.
Hess will remain in prison for the rest of his life.
Meanwhile, intelligence reports indicate that Hitler is planning to invade the Soviet Union,
but Stalin ignores the reports
just as he ignores the last message sent in by Richard Sorge,
a Soviet spy based in Tokyo.
The document dated May 30, 1941, warns of the German attack.
In fact, Stalin continues to send war materials to the Reich.
Since the signing of the German-Soviet Non-aggression Pact,
he has exported thousands of tons of oil, chrome, and nickel to Germany.
All of which, help Hitler to conquer France.
The last train load was sent off on the night of June 21, 1941.
Carrying tons of wheat, this train crosses over the border at midnight.
And on June 22, at 3 AM, without officially declaring war,
The first Wehrmacht sapper’s stealth over into Russian territory.
They are followed by 153 German Divisions,
As well as the Finnish, Romanian, Slovakian, and Hungarian troops.
There is a division of Spanish fascist.
3,000,000 million men, along with 600,000 trucks,
many of which were made by French manufacturer, such as Berliet and Renault.
More than 3,000 tanks, 7,000 cannons,
3,000 aero planes.
Within 24 hours,
1,500 Soviet aircraft are wiped out on the ground.
300 more Russian planes are shot down by the Germans.
Taken by surprise, over-powered,
The Soviet Air Force are suffered a devastating blow.
The German offensive is unleashed across 3,000 km
and in 3 different directions.
In the north, the ideological target, Leningrad.
Lenin city, the cradle of the Russian revolution, modern day's St. Petersburg.
In the center, the political target, Moscow, Stalin's capital.
In the south, the economic target, Kiev, at the Ukraine.
Our armies are thrusting to the east
Into Russian land
Comrades, take your guns!
Victory will be ours
From Finland to the Black Sea
Forward, forward!
Forward to the east, storming army
Freedom is our goal
Victory is our banner
Fuhrer, order us!
We will follow you!
In the northern Baltic states, The German are sometimes hailed as liberators.
After Stalin's reign of terror, anything is better than the NKVD.
The ruthless Soviet Secret Police, responsible for political repression.
Forced to pull out, they execute the Baltic anti-communists in the prisons.
Local anti-Semites accused the Jews are being in collision with the communists.
Jews are forced to carry the corpses.
Across the Baltic states, people started organizing pogrom against Jews
which the German encourages with special instruction like:
Do not leave any traces.
Burning the bodies is one way eliminating them.
On the central line, General Guderian,
German tank strategist and the proponent of the blitzkrieg
is held up by the Stalin line.
A series of fortifications that the panzer grenadier have to take by a sword.
Guderian continues to advance.
But an unforeseen factor soon slows down his fine motorized unit,
as described by von Kageneck:
We advance in our armored cars and the dust envelopes us.
We're in Russia, where road and asphalts don't exist.
It's awful. The sticky yellow or red dust gets into everything
into your eyes, your nose, your mouth.
Under such condition, these men moves 50 km a day.
They've marched all the way through Warsaw, to Oslo, to Bayonne.
They are beginning to realize just how vast Russia is.
Hundreds and hundreds of kilometers go by, without a single village in sight.
It is becoming harder and harder
for the supply, fuel, and ammunition trucks to get through.
But there is another situation that the German soldiers must deal with.
The Russian are putting up a good defense.
A new type of Russian tank appears on the scene
and this is a big surprise.
The T-34, a 30 ton monster
equipped with a formidable cannon and wide tracks that can go anywhere.
It is superior to the German tanks in gun power and armor thickness
but has only rudimentary radios, and clunky gearboxes.
The only weapon powerful enough to neutralize it is the German "88" cannon
Still, the German is better armed and they're army is stronger.
But these 'Ivans', as they call the Russian, will fight to the nail, until the very end.
The Russian have already suffered heavy losses,
but the German casualties were also rising.
The Germans continue to make progress towards their 3 goals.
Leningrad, Moscow, and Kiev by capturing entire armies.
Hitler's orders are to immediately executes all political commissars,
members of the Communist Party whose job is to oversee the officers
and keep an eye on the soldiers in each military unit.
Guderian is opposed to this criminal order.
However, according to the Commander of the 4th Panzer Army Group, General Hopner:
This war must be led with unprecedented brutality.
There is to be no mercy for the Bolsheviks.
The Bolsheviks, the Russian, fight desperately
with fewer and fewer weapons, often with only one riffle for 4 men.
They are forced to retreat along the entire front.
For Stalin, things are looking very bad.
With his heavy, Georgian accent,
he pronounces words he's never used before.
He calls the Russians, 'my brothers' and 'my sisters'. He tells them the truth:
We are under attack by Hitler's Germany. The enemy is cruel and implacable.
A grave danger hangs over our country.
In the darkest hour, he dares to predict:
Is it true that the German fascists are invincible?
Napoleon's army is considered invincible, but it was beaten.
He orders the factories along with their machines and their workers
to relocate to the East, to the Ural mountains.
And he gives farmers and peasants an absolute order:
Leave, leave your izba, your house. Destroy everything.
Leave behind nothing that can be of any use to the fascist-Hitler-right aggressors.
This is Stalin's Scorched Earth Policy.
The German officers have not forgotten about Napoleon.
In 1812, the Russians defeated Napoleon's Grand Army
by burning their towns and fields.
And then massacre the French in the Battle of Berezina.
In early July 1941, the Germans also reach the Berezina River,
on the central front and they keep going.
Resistance by the Soviet is growing stronger.
On the other side of the river, an unpleasant surprise awaits the Germans.
The Russian has set up a new kind of artillery,
a rocket launcher called 'Stalin's Organ' or 'Katyusha'
that was a sound like a mess of organ pipes.
A most terrifying weapon.
But nothing can stop the German advance.
By mid-July, they have reached Smolensk,
the last big city before Moscow.
The battle of Smolensk lasts 3 weeks.
The Russians fight until the very end
despite the calls for surrender coming over the German land speakers.
Surrender!
You will be treated well.
Very few are taken prisoner.
Some of the survivors go into hiding in the deep forest and become insurgents.
They are joined by many peasants and farmers, whom they train to fight.
They hunt down traitors and disrupt enemy's communication lines.
The ‘Grizzle’ are brutal. The Fuhrer orders:
Immediately liquidate all people suspected of harboring even the smallest amount of hostility.
Hitler consults with the Wehrmacht's commander-in-chief, Field Marshall Keitel.
Operation Barbarossa is slowing down.
Some of the generals believe that Hitler's strategy of using a 3-prompt attack is to blame.
Instead Marshall von Bock, commander of the army group center
wants all of his forces focused on Moscow.
Hitler does not like generals who dare to contradict him.
General Guderian is there, he insists:
We're only 350 km away from Moscow now.
You understand nothing, says the Fuhrer.
You know nothing of all time economics.
First, we need the wheat from the Ukraine,
so that they don't starve as they did in the previous war.
Moscow is nothing but a symbol. We'll take care of it later.
He orders Guderian to swing south towards Kiev
in order to close the ***** around the Russian armies still operating
in pockets to the rear of the Wehrmacht.
It will be the biggest encirclement of all time.
The Germans capture 600,000 Russian soldiers in one fell swoop.
Himmler comes through on a visit.
No provision had been made to feed the prisoners.
With supreme indifference,
Himmler contemplates those he calls the 'untermensch',
or 'sub-human'.
He will coldly let them starve to death.
Lieutenant von Kageneck writes:
We live quite well in the Ukraine.
We had everything we needed: eggs, butter, fruits, milk, wine,
an excellent red wine from the area around the Black Sea.
He goes on:
The Ukrainians will come up to us, smiling, filled with joy.
The women will bring us bread and honey.
They shore us as their liberators.
The Ukrainians have many reasons to hate the Russians, and especially Stalin,
who in the early 30s, orchestrated a massive starvation policy
that killed as many as 7,000,000 people.
Many Ukrainians, some anti-Semitic, also incriminated the Jews and carry out pogroms
such as here in Zolochiv, while the Germans look on.
In fact, many Ukrainians side with the Nazis.
But Germany will spoil this opportunity to gain an ally.
Marshall Goering, the second highest ranking figure in the Reich, comes to the Ukraine.
He says:
No useless mouth to feed
Those who could work, have to work for the Reich. The rest, will die.
Those who work have to give everything they have until they themselves die.
Goering is here to implement this policy of enslaving the Ukraine
and to carry out the methodical annihilation of the Jews.
He is accompanied by Alfred Rosenberg, a central theoretician of Nazi racism.
Himmler and Heydrich set up execution commandos called 'einsatz grupen',
for the compose of SS members, policemen, and Wehrmacht soldiers,
who round up the Jews.
The SS take the Jews into the woods and give them shovels
so that they can dig their own graves.
But they decide that this process is too slow.
So they order long, common graves to be dug
and make their victims lay down on top of the last group of dead bodies
But even this procedure takes too long.
The SS prepare a ravine known as 'Babi Yar', near Kiev.
33,771 Jews will be executed in 2 days.
Men, women, and children.
In this 'living hell', as in hundreds of others through out the front,
the executioners take picture of their victims
This premeditated, cold-blooded massacre of a million of Jews
will come to be known as 'The Holocaust by bullets'.
But Himmler is not pleased.
He has attended one of the 'einsatz grupens' so called 'actionz'.
Noticing the psychological burden of this mass killing have for his soldiers,
he begins searching alternative methods.
This would lead to the use of a gas van with exhaust pipe hooked up to their rear compartments.
And a year later, the gas chambers.
In the north, the long siege of Leningrad begins.
The Germans have their plan:
Instead of fighting in the streets,
we'll let our artillery and starvation do the job.
City buildings are destroyed.
A zoo elephant is the victim of an air raid.
Food ration soon fall below the minimum necessary.
But the worst is to come with the arrival of winter.
In the south, Guderian finally received the order from Hitler
to rejoin the other armies up north, and proceeds towards Moscow.
Along this enormous front, from Leningrad to Odessa
the thrust towards Moscow seems unstoppable.
The Germans take another 700,000 prisoners.
General Jodl, chief of staff of the Wehrmacht says:
We have won the war.
von Kageneck writes:
We suddenly have to deal with the most frightful adversary,
the autumn rain and mud, which the Russians called "rasputiza".
Endless mud so gluey and sticky that it sucks and hold onto everything.
They won't let go of anything,
whether it be a tank, a truck, a horse, or a man.
It makes any movement impossible.
We do 5 to 8 km a day, instead of 30.
Putting one foot in front of the other require superhuman effort.
The panzer, the pride of the Wehrmacht, are brought to a stand still.
Hitler writes to his troops:
Soldiers in the eastern front,
Comrades, today begins the last, great decisive battle.
And all at once, the German army starts moving again towards Moscow
because the frost has come and harden the ground.
The world is holding its breath. Will Hitler defeat Stalin?
This is when the rightwing extremists in the occupied countries
start signing up to serve in the German Army.
Belgians, Danes, Dutchmen,
and the young men in the LVF (Legion French Volunteers),
decide to don the German uniform and fight on the Eastern Front.
They will suffer.
An early cold front sweeps through begin in November 1941.
Temperatures will plummet to almost -40 degrees Celsius.
The Wehrmacht was designed to conduct a blitzkrieg, a lightning war.
It was supposed to bring Russia to its knees in 4 months.
It is not equipped for winter.
Guderian writes in his memoirs:
It was a sight to see those half starved, insufficiently clothed men
fight over a poor shelter.
They fight to control even the tiniest village.
Losing a village, losing even a single izba means death.
The men die of cold, or of dysentery.
Diarrhea makes them run off 30 times a day.
Doctor Haape, the Wehrmacht physician warns them:
You have to choose: if you pull down your trousers, you'll freeze to death.
You must take a pat the seam in the back, so you won't have to pull them down.
In sharp contrasts, the men in Afrikakorp, in the desert
are able to fry egg on the top of the sizzling surfaces of their tanks,
while listening to the war song, "Lili Marlene".
The war in the desert has also getting bogged down, in the sand.
Petrol and food supply are lacking.
Rommel has to order a halt.
However, he is planning a new offensive
And new sacrifices for his men in the Afrikakorp.
Meanwhile, on the road to Moscow,
The Germans are no longer able to wash or change their clothes.
Like their enemies, they are driven crazy by lice, and parasites
that bring scabies and typhus.
Napoleon's Grand Army lost over 100,000 men to typhus.
In spite of it all, the Wehrmacht pushes on.
The German vanguard reaches the outskirts of Moscow,
and even in the end of a bus line that goes straight to Red Square.
While the Soviet army holds back the advancing German troops,
Stalin orders the parade commemorating the anniversary of the revolution to be held as usual.
To galvanize his troops, Stalin makes a speech
that invokes forbidden images from the past, the great soldiers from the time of the Tsars.
Be worthy of your glorious ancestors,
Alexander Nevsky, Dmitry Pozharsky,
Alexander Suvorov, and Mikhail Kutuzov.
Stalin has organized Moscow's defense in conjunction with one of his most brilliant generals.
A tank specialist considered to be the Russian equivalent of Guderian,
45 years old, General Zhukov.
Luck is on Zhukov's side.
Sorge, the Soviet spy, has discovered that Japan, though it is Hitler's ally
has not decided to attack Russia, because its primary enemy is The United States.
This enable Zhukov to reduce the number of troops in the Far East.
He brings over several of the Siberian Divisions, they are well equipped.
Siberians are not afraid of the cold.
They are rugged, outdoors men, who used into using their whips.
They've brought their ski, and their reindeer with them,
And now they are going hunting, for Germans.
Zhukov wants to trap the Wehrmacht on a pinsel movement.
Some 30,000 Germans are killed or missing.
Thousands are sent off to Siberia.
Their struggle with the cold are far from over.
Less than 1 in 3 will return home, almost 15 years later.
August von Kageneck is severely wounded and evacuated back to Germany.
He writes:
Faith disappears, doubt become obsessive,
Death becomes your best friend, men's only friend,
because it will deliver you, from your suffering.
The suffering of the Russian is not over either.
Their country has been ravage,
Moscow has been saved, but millions of people have been killed, or taken prisoner,
and the danger is still there.
The Wehrmacht has been pushed back 200km.
Hitler orders his army to defend that new line at all costs.
He dismisses 35 generals, including Guderian,
and takes personal charge of the Wehrmacht.
He was succeeded in re-establishing his army's position,
Re-equipping his troops, and plotting his revenge.
The Wehrmacht remains firmly planted in Russia.
Hitler returns to his dogs back in his chalet in Bavaria.
It is opinion the defeat
before Moscow was the fort of his generals and his diplomats.
Weren't they the one's who would claim the France and the Britain wouldn't go to war for Poland?
and of the Abwehr, the German Intelligence Service,
that misinformed them about the state of the Russian army.
Hitler adds:
The Bolshevik army is made up from peasants who fight with barbarian and consciousness,
and workers, trained by fanatical mysticism of communism.
But Hitler believes in his 'lucky star',
he will prevail.
He can enjoy himself in the company of his 'sacred' fans
Here, Bormann' mistress introduces him to a German movie star,
the actress, Magda Schneider.
Not far away, her daughter, Romy Schneider, plays with Bormann's children.
Life in Germany is still carefree.
The massive bombing has not yet begun
and those who sacrifice their life in Moscow are so far away
deep in the snow.
Two days after Hitler's major defeat,
his ally, Japan, launches a surprise attack
on the United States big naval base in the Pacific, Pearl Harbor.
And with this wave of Japanese planes,
the war becomes a 'world war'.
In London, Rose dances. She's already dreaming of Christmas.
She hears her parents say,
Now the Americans will fight on our side,
The Russians on our side.
We, British, are no longer alone in this. anymore.
Need help on some blanks (*****).