RAPID GUNFIRE
EXPLOSIONS
Stalingrad at the end of October 1942.
The city on the Volga had still not fallen.
German soldiers listened to the Fuhrer on the radio.
"We have taken Stalingrad.
"A few pockets of resistance remain.
"We will take them one by one, it's just a question of time."
For Hitler, the fate of the Third Reich
depended on what happened at Stalingrad.
This series is the epic story of World War II...
..as it raged across countries and continents,
as millions of soldiers fought from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
It is the moving story of the millions of civilians,
whose homes were destroyed and lives disrupted...
..as they were caught up in the cataclysm of war.
To tell this story, the best footage of the war has been painstakingly
transformed, using digital techniques, into colour.
Along with original colour home movies, it gives a completely
new perspective to one of the greatest events of the last century.
This is the powerful story of the Apocalypse, and of the people
who fought the Second World War.
After two years of bitter fighting in Russia,
the Eastern Front was at a standstill.
In the north, Leningrad was still surrounded by the Germans.
After 700 days of siege, the Soviets continued to resist.
In the centre, Moscow had still not been captured by the Germans.
In the south, the drive towards the Baku oilfields had come to a halt
in the Caucasian mountains.
In Stalingrad, the Russians were holding their ground.
Contrary to Hitler's declarations,
Soviet boats continued to cross the Volga, bringing reinforcements.
Every day, thousands of young men, sometimes without any weapons
or military training, were disembarked on the riverbank.
Those who backed away from the German shells
were ruthlessly executed by the political commissars.
One officer, Colonel Ludnikov declares:
"We fight for each and every metre of earth.
"But our metre is different, it is the Stalingrad metre.
"Every centimetre counts.
"We bite the earth.
"We do not retreat."
The Germans tried to drive them out with flame-throwers.
Stalingrad became a raging inferno.
On the 7th of November,
the anniversary of the Revolution, the beleaguered soldiers
holding Stalingrad and the Russian troops along the Front
heard their commander in chief, Stalin,
make this astonishing declaration:
"Tomorrow there will be celebrations in our streets!"
General Georgi Zhukov, the man who had saved Moscow,
had a plan for Stalingrad -
to keep the tiny centres of resistance fighting on
in order to keep the German troops of General von Paulus
inside the city.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the Volga,
Zhukov was secretly assembling a new army.
Every man had to swear an oath to Stalin.
IN TRANSLATION FROM RUSSIAN
The Soviet Union had been ravaged.
A quarter of its territory had been lost.
But workers across the entire Soviet Union
were toiling to provide this new army
with huge amounts of equipment.
Factories that were moved out and rebuilt on the Asian border
were operating 24 hours a day.
Here, countless lives would also be sacrificed.
In the winter of 1942,
the women working in these unheated workshops were cold and hungry.
Many died, simply of exhaustion.
But the country's industrial production increased tenfold.
The United States was also providing massive aid to Russia.
The Allies were able to reduce the threat
posed by German U-boats in the North Atlantic
by forming convoys protected by the Navy to bring supplies to Britain.
Anti-Communism was a thing of the past.
For the Americans, Joseph Stalin was now "Uncle Joe".
In Britain, he was "Good old Joe".
The Russians received huge shipments of Jeeps, tanks, planes, trucks,
and corned beef.
When they opened the tinned meat, the Russian soldiers joked,
"We're opening the second front."
Everyone expected the Allies to do more to help the Russians.
Stalin called for a Second Front, for landings in occupied Europe.
In Egypt, however, the British were pushed back by the Germans.
Rommel was promoted by Hitler to Field Marshall after his victories
in the desert, and his tank army,
the Afrika Korps, was getting dangerously close to the Suez Canal.
They had reached El Alamein -
just 80 miles from Cairo.
CHEERING
Prime Minister Winston Churchill paid a visit to Egypt
to encourage his army in the desert.
The situation was grim, but he retained his sense of humour.
He said, "The secret to good health is to drink, smoke and, above all,
"to do no exercise."
And yet he had already suffered a minor heart attack.
He met with the newly-appointed General, Bernard Montgomery.
Montgomery wasn't Churchill's first choice, but he was now in command
of the 8th Army, made up of British, Australians, New Zealanders,
South Africans and Free French soldiers.
As soon as he arrived, Montgomery ordered a new programme
of physical exercises and discipline to be imposed.
One of his officers, Captain Belchem, remembered:
"What struck us was that he was small and thin.
"He wasn't tanned like the rest of us.
"He said a few words for the occasion.
"'We're going to fight at El Alamein, and we'll come out of it
"'dead or alive.' And he hung a picture of Rommel in his tent."
Montgomery was the opposite of Rommel.
He was cautious, not daring.
He waited until his army was superior
in terms of both men and equipment. He was lucky to get the new,
American, Sherman tanks, built for speed and power.
But paths still needed to be cleared for them
through the desert minefields.
Captain Belchem explained:
"There is nothing more horrible.
"Everyone had planted mines. Millions of them.
"The German mines with the double springs were the most diabolical."
EXPLOSION
"The poor chap who stepped on one would hear the click,
"but nothing would happen.
"Then when he raised his foot..."
EXPLOSION
On the 23rd of October 1942,
Montgomery finally launched his offensive,
with an artillery barrage followed by a massive tank assault.
But the German 88mm guns caused tremendous losses.
Rommel's soldiers counter-attacked relentlessly.
The battle turned into a bayonet charge,
just like at the Battle of the Somme in 1916,
with heavy casualties on both sides.
But in this deadly game, the side with most men and guns would win.
Rommel wrote:
"We're simply being crushed by the enemy's weight."
He received a message from Hitler telling him,
"There can be no other thought than to stand fast,
"yield not a yard of ground."
Rommel wrote in his secret diary:
"I rack my brains for a way out of this plight for my poor troops.
"We are facing perhaps the most difficult days a man can undergo.
"The dead are lucky - it's all over for them."
Finally, Rommel ordered a retreat.
He saved his men by stealing petrol from his Italian allies,
who were left to be taken prisoner,
even though they had fought courageously during the battle.
CHURCHILL'S VOICE OVER PA
In London,
Churchill announced what was the first good news of the war.
Now, this is not the end.
It is not even the beginning of the end.
But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.
"The end of the beginning."
Churchill's words rang out around the world.
The British lion had stood up to Hitler.
Back in his headquarters, the Wolf's Lair, Hitler was scornful.
He declared, "It's just a setback.
"The war will go on."
Two weeks after the victory at El Alamein,
the Allies opened up a new Front with landings in North Africa.
A first step towards controlling the Mediterranean.
As in the First World War,
American troops sailed across the Atlantic to join a European war.
Outside Casablanca and Oran, the British and Americans landings
were greeted with heavy gunfire from the French.
North Africa was still controlled by the French Vichy regime,
which collaborated with the Germans.
So now Frenchmen were fighting against British and American troops.
The Free French leader, General de Gaulle,
broadcast over the radio from London.
After two days of heavy fighting, the French guns fell silent.
The Allied landings then continued unopposed.
In Algiers, the pragmatic US Commander-In-Chief,
General Dwight D Eisenhower,
negotiated with the Vichy regime's military commander, Admiral Darlan.
Darlan was one of France most diehard collaborators.
He had even met Hitler.
But now he decided to switch sides, and the French forces in Algeria
and Morocco joined the Allies.
A few weeks later,
Darlan would be assassinated by a French Resistance fighter.
CHEERING
At last, the Americans were greeted
warmly by the French in North Africa.
But Hitler had countered the Allies by occupying Tunisia,
a country still controlled by the Vichy regime,
which allowed the Germans to stay.
Rommel was retreating towards Tunisia.
Then, in order to secure the Mediterranean coast,
Hitler invaded the southern half of France, the unoccupied Free Zone.
Hitler's orders were to take the port of Toulon,
where most of the French navy was based.
Petain's admirals decided to scuttle their fleet.
They sunk their own ships in order to keep them from falling into
the hands of the Germans.
Or the Allies.
This was the price paid for the compromises of the Petain regime.
But also, it was a blow for Hitler.
The arrival of the Germans spread terror throughout the former
Free Zone, where many Jews had found a precarious refuge.
Amid the increasingly sinister atmosphere of round-ups
and denunciations all over Europe,
children were saved by courageous families,
like Carl de Brouwer's family.
De Brouwer was a Belgian banker.
He filmed his four children, while he and his wife Denise
hid two Jewish children.
Monique Mogoulsky, the 12-year-old daughter of an engineer -
who was himself in hiding somewhere -
and six-year-old Adrien Sapcaru.
Adrien's mother was arrested and deported to a work camp
in Eastern Europe.
She would never return from Auschwitz.
By now, many people began to suspect that when the occupiers used words
like "work camp", what they really meant was "death camp".
Carl and Denise de Brouwer were everyday heroes who would
later be awarded the title of Righteous Among The Nations,
along with nearly 20,000 other men and women
from all over occupied Europe.
1,200 miles away, outside Stalingrad,
the Germans were enjoying a brief respite before returning to fight
the Russians and to eliminate the remaining pockets of resistance.
The German army's flanks were defended by units from
the Reich satellite countries - Romanians, Hungarians
and Italians, who were totally unaware of the danger looming.
A few miles away, the Soviet troops were preparing to attack.
They were filled with hate. And there were more than
a million of them.
Their plan was to storm the enemy's weakest units in order to surround
the German army occupying Stalingrad.
At 5am on November 19th,
3,000 guns and Katyushas opened up on the enemy lines.
An Italian soldier fighting alongside the Germans,
Eugenio Corti, described the scene.
The rockets came down as fast as hail.
The ground was shaking, just like in an earthquake.
Zhukov's massive army now went on the offensive.
The Hungarians collapsed because they didn't have enough ammunition.
The Romanians were defeated because they didn't have
any anti-tank weapons.
The Italians were slaughtered.
The two Russian armies from the north and the south met up,
and Soviet film-makers recreated the moment of glory.
The Germans watched as the Russian tanks closed the circle around them.
General von Paulus's Sixth Army was now trapped inside Stalingrad.
Hitler was at the Berghof, his retreat in the Bavarian Alps,
when he was informed of the Soviet offensive.
His immediate reaction was to tell his associates,
"We have to hide this news from the German people."
He rushed to his headquarters in East Prussia, declaring,
If the Sixth Army withdraws from Stalingrad,
the Wehrmacht will never be able to return there.
General von Paulus could still have broken out of the encirclement,
but he would have had to disobey orders.
For when Hitler arrived at the Wolf's Lair,
he sent him this message.
"Stand firm.
"An army will come to rescue you."
But no army was able to reach them and the aircraft of the Luftwaffe
failed to provide them with sufficient supplies,
in spite of the promises made by
the head of the air force, Hermann Goering.
At Christmas, rations were reduced
to 50 grams of bread and 12 grams of fat.
Paul Gerhardt Moeller, a 30-year-old medical corps soldier, wrote home.
Dearest Magdalena.
This letter is an attempt,
probably the last, to contact the outside world.
My darling,
I don't want to cause you any needless pain, but you should be
aware of what things are like here.
There are so many wounded.
The situation is much more miserable than anything
we have experienced until now.
I want to thank you again for being so faithful and for your love.
I've caused you to suffer too often, and that makes me very sad.
Please forgive me.
Lieutenant von Loebbecke wrote...
On our radios, we heard a Russian repeating over and over in German,
"A German soldier dies in Russia every seven seconds.
"Stalingrad Massengrab."
Stalingrad, a mass grave.
Mussolini, who had just lost an army at Stalingrad, was desperate
for a way to end the war.
He said to Hitler, "I am convinced that Russia can never be destroyed.
"A territory that big could never be conquered."
He took Hitler aside and added, "The Russian chapter is over.
"We should make peace with Stalin."
But for Hitler, to agree to negotiate was to admit that
the campaign in Russia had been a huge failure.
Nonetheless, secret talks were started through the intermediary
of Sweden and the Vatican.
Future events, however, would not give Hitler any choice.
On the 13th of January 1943
Roosevelt, the President of the United States,
arrived in Casablanca to attend his first big conference overseas.
He and Churchill wanted to
agree on the priorities for the next stage of the war in the west.
Churchill and the British team were clearly focused on their objectives.
After several days of talks, the Prime Minister and the President
agreed on the way ahead.
At the closing press conference, Roosevelt and Churchill
made a declaration of the utmost importance.
They announced that the ultimate objective of Allied policy
was the unconditional surrender of Germany, Japan and Italy.
There would be no more negotiating.
The Allies would keep fighting the Axis powers until the very end.
The price in lives would be high, and many believed that this position,
whose purpose was to reassure the Russians,
would only increase the devotion of the German people to their Fuhrer.
Stalin was satisfied.
He feared that Hitler would conclude a separate peace with the Allies
in order to pit all of his forces against Russia.
He now launched his offensive to annihilate
the remains of the German Army still inside the ruins of Stalingrad.
A Soviet captain, Joseph Praoutov, wrote to his wife:
"I feel better now.
"We've got the better of those snakes.
"We've captured a lot of them."
"They're starting to pay for the blood they have shed,
"for the tears of our people.
"I'll be home soon. I'm sending you 500 roubles.
"Joseph."
The Russians fought their way to the centre of the city.
Beyond the Red Flag was a building where the commander of the 6th Army,
General Friedrich von Paulus, was entrenched.
His men surrendered one by one.
Then Von Paulus himself surrendered, on the 31st of January 1943.
The day before, Hitler had promoted him to Field Marshal,
thinking it would compel him to commit suicide in order to save his honour.
But Von Paulus, on the verge of collapse, weakened by dysentery
and disgusted by the absurdity
of Hitler's orders, let himself be captured.
Field Marshal Von Paulus was a fantastic prize for the Russians.
He was the man who had masterminded Operation Barbarossa,
the invasion of the Soviet Union.
The Soviet officials could hardly believe it
and asked him for his military papers to verify his identity.
Von Paulus went on to collaborate with the Russians
and testified at the Nuremberg Trials against his former commanders.
He later chose to live in Communist East Germany.
His reaction was mainly a rejection of Hitler's senseless policies.
Many of his men felt the same way.
"Hitler can go to the devil", the German prisoners dared to mutter
in the few words of Russian they knew. "We want to go home."
After the German defeat at Stalingrad, hope was revived
among the people in every country occupied by Nazi Germany.
The German news broadcasts did not, of course,
show any of these images. And Hitler said:
"We must not use the word surrender.
"We must explain that our men
"were unable to receive supplies, and that's why they were beaten.
"We have to use the word sacrifice."
The Nazis tried to turn this disaster into an opportunity
for galvanizing the German people.
At a huge rally in Berlin's Sports Palace, Joseph Goebbels,
the Minister of Propaganda, tried to mobilize the nation's energy
and resources after the defeat.
CROWD SINGS
In the audience, ecstatic, was Albert Speer.
He provided Hitler with the means to implement total war.
Hitler called him his only friend.
This 38-year-old architect, creator of the Fuhrer's
wild architectural dreams, had been appointed Minister of Armaments.
Speer gave a new impetus to German war industry.
He was a brilliant organiser but, above all, he was an ardent Nazi.
Under his orders, four million Soviet civilians were rounded up
and worked to exhaustion or death.
After Russia and Poland, it was occupied France
that provided the Nazis with the greatest number of workers.
The Vichy regime handed out
compulsory work permits and sent 600,000 French workers to Germany.
Behind the walls of the Warsaw Ghetto,
the Germans were confronted by a Jewish uprising.
EXPLOSION
Before the war, the Warsaw Ghetto had been a lively,
open district, filmed in colour here by an American tourist.
These Jews were just like the characters in the Yiddish novels
of Sholem Aleichem, who wrote, "May everyone remember us with a smile."
These were the same human beings in 1940.
The Nazis had turned the ghetto into an overpopulated prison.
This woman shrieks in grief
as she carries her dead child through its streets.
This was the ghetto in 1941.
In 1942.
In 1943.
The Nazis deliberately starved the people in order to weaken them
and prevent any kind of revolt.
But the Jews managed to smuggle in weapons, and they died fighting.
The survivors were deported to
the Treblinka extermination camp, and murdered.
The ghetto was razed to the ground.
At the same time, the Allies won another victory.
British and American armies triumphantly entered Tunis.
CROWDS CHEER
Behind these gates, the Germans had already initiated policies
to persecute the Jews in Tunisia during their short-lived occupation.
The Allies immediately told them to remove their yellow stars.
The Italian prisoners were jeered at by the crowds.
Rommel, stranded in Tunisia, was filmed by one of his officers
before he boarded one of the last planes leaving for Germany.
He wrote:
"I have received instructions
"to take sick leave and get myself back into shape.
"All my efforts to save my men and get them back to Europe have been fruitless.
"Orders have been issued by the Fuhrer's headquarters
"to maintain the utmost secrecy concerning my recall to Germany.
"My military reputation is still to serve as a deterrent."
Rommel's entire army, the Afrika Korps,
was captured and was now marching in long lines towards the ships of
the American fleet, to be taken away to the other side of the Atlantic.
During the war, 380,000 German prisoners
were sent to Canada and the United States, where escape was impossible.
These prisoners were about to embark on a strange odyssey.
It began on these military transport ships.
Many felt like they were in a dream.
For them, the war was over and they were safe.
But for these German soldiers, even here, the Nazis remained in control.
These men disembarking in Canada
insisted on making the "Heil Hitler" salute -
even if they only had one arm.
On the Eastern Front, since the fall of Stalingrad,
the Wehrmacht was no longer the same.
The soldiers exchanged rumours about the Fuhrer.
"Apparently, he's lost his head.
"He's being secretly held in Berchtesgaden.
"It's his double that we're seeing."
But the rumours were untrue.
Hitler, here in the Berghof, was filmed by his mistress Eva Braun.
Since his army's defeat at Stalingrad and El Alamein,
he had changed. His famous moustache had greyed.
One of his generals, von Senger, was struck by his appearance.
"His skin was flaccid. The look in his blue eyes, which had
"so mesmerised the crowds, was reddened by insomnia."
His physician, Dr Morell, made up cocaine eye drops for him.
Morell was able to make him presentable for public ceremonies.
But Hitler was careful to hide his left arm.
It tended to tremble,
because he was starting to show signs of Parkinson's disease.
As a result, the head of the SS,
Heinrich Himmler, became even more important.
The SS, whose recruits came from the Hitler Youth,
started out as the Schutzstaffel, the protection squad
for Nazi officials.
Later, it provided the guards for the concentration camps.
The SS had now created a powerful army of its own, the Waffen SS.
In the future, these elite troops under Himmler's orders were expected
to replace the Wehrmacht, which was no longer considered
completely loyal.
Himmler recruited increasingly in the occupied countries, like these
fanatics in the Bosnian SS.
In the occupied areas of Russia, the SS also had no difficulty
recruiting two divisions of Cossacks who, in the time of the Tsars,
had been notorious for their bloody anti-Semitic pogroms.
They formed the fearsome 15th SS Cavalry Corps.
The Wehrmacht enlisted one
million Soviet prisoners who were given a simple choice -
die of hunger or fight alongside the Germans.
Some, like former Soviet
general Andrei Vlasov, were also against Stalin.
Vlasov, a hero of the battle of Leningrad, was taken prisoner
and then changed sides.
He went on to command the Russian Liberation Army
under the flag of the Wehrmacht.
The Germans kitted out these foreign troops with the best equipment,
such as the Tiger tank, designed by the brilliant engineer
Ferdinand Porsche.
And with its 88mm gun,
the most effective in the war, one Tiger was worth ten Allied tanks.
Back in the Wolf's Lair, Hitler now began to feel hopeful again.
He could renew his obsession with destroying the Red Army.
He planned a new attack
at Kursk.
The Russians had pushed forward into the German front line,
offering an opportunity to encircle and crush them.
It was called Operation Zitadelle.
It was the biggest armoured clash in history,
2,700 German tanks against 3,600 Soviet tanks.
But the technical superiority of the Tiger was overwhelming.
Hitler was confident.
To lead his force of 600,000 soldiers, he had chosen the man
who had won the Battle of France -
Field Marshal Erich von Manstein.
The offensive, led by the Tiger tanks,
broke through the Soviet lines but encountered massive anti-armour
defences built by the Russians along with dense concentrations of tanks.
The Wehrmacht's troops were pushed back.
They had the impression that the enemy knew exactly where they were going to attack.
Each time, the T-34 Russian tanks
were already there, waiting in ambush.
In fact, code breakers at Bletchley Park in Britain had succeeded in
capturing and decoding the German encryption machine called Enigma,
and they were now able to read
almost all of the top-secret
German orders.
Churchill passed on much of this information to Stalin
without telling him where the intelligence came from.
The Soviets thought the British
had very good agents inside Nazi Germany.
This war was also an espionage war.
At Kursk, the outcome was devastating for
the Germans, who lost 50,000 men in the first phase of the battle.
Von Manstein wanted reinforcements in order to continue his offensive.
Hitler came to visit the front.
Manstein immediately told him, "We've suffered losses, but the
"Russians have, too, even worse."
Hitler seemed very hesitant.
He muttered a few inanities.
Von Manstein later wrote, "He seemed to me to be quite feeble."
This impression was confirmed when von Manstein
showed Hitler the figures of the losses incurred at Kursk.
Since the beginning of the war, two million German soldiers had
been killed, wounded or gone missing in action.
The Waffen SS would never be able to fill that void.
Things were now a far cry from the victories of the
lightning-war campaigns, like the Blitzkrieg conquest of France.
Kursk was the real turning point in the war,
because Hitler moved onto the defensive.
Overcome by paranoia, he insisted on having stenographers present to
record for posterity everything that was said at this crucial moment.
Von Manstein argued that not everything was lost.
But Hitler disagreed.
Von Manstein pleaded with him to continue the offensive.
Hitler refused. The Battle of Kursk was over.
For Hitler, the priority was now to send reinforcements to Sicily,
where the American and British armies had just landed.
The noose was tightening.
Things were moving fast.
All Hitler could do was try to hold back the advancing Allies.
But he was unable to prevent the fall of Mussolini, which led Italy
to surrender and to change sides.
The new Italian government had Mussolini imprisoned up in the
mountains.
Hitler sent an airborne commando squad to rescue him.
Hitler wanted Mussolini back in power.
He sent him back to Italy
to re-establish his fascist regime with the help of the German army.
Hitler ordered
the military occupation of Italy and had no qualms about slaughtering
any of his former allies who attempted to resist.
He occupied Rome and immediately started rounding up Jews.
Hitler's main concern was to prevent any further Allied landings in Italy
but above all in France.
This was the idea behind the construction of Fortress Europe with
its Atlantic wall, a vast system of fortifications stretching from
Norway down to the Spanish border.
Rommel was put in charge of defending Fortress Europe. He said,
"It is absolutely necessary
"that we push the British and the Americans back from the beaches.
"Afterwards, it will be too late.
"The first 24 hours of the invasion will be decisive.
"It will be the longest day."
For Rommel and the Nazis, this was the beginning of the end.
But these German newsreel images of Rommel, who had been
invited to tea by Magda Goebbels, the wife of the propaganda minister,
show how the Nazis wanted to project themselves at this point in the war.
Nazi ideology put total faith in victory and vanquished all doubt.
Magda Goebbels worshipped Hitler like a god even
though he was driving Germany into a frenzy of bloodshed and death.
She had given her six children first names that all begin with H,
just like Hitler -
Helga, Hildegard, Helmut, Holdine, Hedwig and Heidrun.
She would kill them all, one by one, on the last day of the Reich.