Apocalypse: The Second World War (2009): Season 1, Episode 1 - L'agression - full transcript
May 1945. After days of violent fighting, Soviet troops enter into a devastated Berlin. But how did it come to this? 1939. The German and Soviet invasion of Poland crushes the last hopes for a peaceful resolution of political tensions. Great Britain and France have no choice but to declare war on Hitler. Meanwhile, Hitler makes a bold, fearsome plan for the invasion of France.
Berlin. The 20th of April, 1945.
Adolf Hitler's 56th birthday.
With the Soviet Red
Army closing in,
Hitler came up from his
bunker to make one last
appearance for the cameras,
to meet the boys who were now almost
the only ones still fighting for him.
10 days later, Hitler was dead.
A few weeks later, the
war in Europe was over.
The Second World War
left 50 million dead,
many more civilians
than military.
This series is the epic
story of that war...
..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.
Berlin in the early 1930s.
A lively, vibrant city.
Marlene Dietrich
sang The Blue Angel.
Artists and writers gathered
to exchange ideas in the shade
of the lime trees on
avenue Unter den Linden.
Berlin was a major cultural centre
of Europe, one of the most open
and tolerant cities
in the world.
SHE SINGS IN GERMAN
Then, in 1933, all that changed.
Through intimidation and violence,
Hitler and his armed militias like
the SA seized
control of Germany.
Their hymn was the
"Horst Wessel" song.
CROWD SINGS HORST WESSEL
The Nazis took advantage of the
fact that the socialist parties
in Germany were divided.
It almost seemed that Hitler, with his
raised fist revolutionary salute,
wanted to win their support.
German Communists took
their orders from Moscow.
The Kremlin saw the
Social-Democrats as the true enemy.
No alliance was
possible with them.
For the last time, German
Communists sang The Internationale.
Hitler came to power, perfectly
legally, on the 30th of January 1933.
Within a few months, his
dictatorship was firmly in place.
He became the
Fuhrer, the Leader.
All of Germany had to rise
and chant, "Heil Hitler!".
However, not all Germans
were convinced,
so Hitler continued to hammer home
his simplistic nationalist slogans.
CHEERING
And he eventually won people
over with his remarkable power
of persuasion over the masses.
In his book, Mein Kampf
- My Struggle -
Hitler clearly laid out what
he called his "missions".
As one of the embittered veterans
of the First World War, his first
mission was to destroy France,
to wipe out the humiliation of
the Versailles Treaty of 1919
that stripped Germany of its army
and part of its territory.
He wanted to conquer what he called
"lebensraum" - living space.
Germany had a population of 80
million, twice that of France.
He wanted to make Germany
a world superpower.
A pathological anti-Semite,
Hitler also took on the mission
of asserting the superiority
of the Germanic Aryan race,
menaced, he believed,
by the Jews.
For him, the Jews were the cause of
the Great War, of Germany's defeat,
of inflation and unemployment.
The next war would be
a war on the Jews.
To start with, they were sent to
Dachau, the first concentration camp,
where Hitler also locked up
the anti-Nazis - communists,
social-democrats and others.
Hitler also believed it
was his mission to bring
all the German-speaking peoples
into the Greater Reich, beginning
with those of his
homeland, Austria.
In 1938, Austria was annexed and then
submitted to the same reign of terror
as Germany, with the opening of one
of the most infamous concentration
camps at Mauthausen near Linz.
Hitler visited the village of his
birth in Austria and the schoolhouse
where, in 1899, like these
poor, barefoot children,
he had been a pupil.
His next victim would be
neighbouring Czechoslovakia,
where there was a German
population, the Sudeten Germans.
But the country was under the
protection of England and France.
A crisis followed.
Munich, temple of
Nazism, September 1938.
An 11th hour peace conference.
On one side, Adolf Hitler,
and his ally, the Italian
dictator Benito Mussolini.
On the other side, the
western democracies.
Neville Chamberlain, the
Conservative British Prime Minister,
and the radical-socialist French
Premier Edouard Daladier.
They ended up accepting
the unacceptable -
they gave up the Czech province
of Sudetenland to Hitler
in exchange for his
solemn promise
to make no more claims on any
other European territory.
But just six months later,
in March 1939,
Hitler invaded the
rest of Czechoslovakia
and entered Prague accompanied
by Marshal Hermann Goering.
Goering, a former
First World War
fighter pilot, one of the founders of
the Nazi Party, was the Air Minister.
Hitler no longer needed the excuse
of reuniting German-speaking people.
He could now take over all of
Czechoslovakia's powerful industries.
The Allies did
nothing to stop him.
The Soviet Union was the only
nation left to counter Hitler.
It had signed a mutual
assistance treaty with France.
The Union of Soviet Socialist
Republics was the official name
of Communist Russia.
Behind the mass parades in Red
Square was the iron-fisted
dictatorship of Stalin, who had also
thrown millions into his camps.
Industrialisation and
forced militarisation
had made the USSR a major power.
Despite their fear of Communism,
the Western powers relied
on the Soviet Union.
But Hitler and Stalin were
about to stun the world.
Summer, 1939.
In his Berchtesgaden retreat, with
his Minister of Foreign Affairs,
Joachim von Ribbentrop,
Hitler prepared an
extraordinary diplomatic coup.
Hitler, who had sworn to destroy
communism, sent Ribbentrop to Moscow
to sign a history-making treaty
with his deadliest enemy.
When Stalin's Foreign Affairs Minister,
Molotov, signed the German-Soviet Pact,
Communists in the West
were totally taken aback.
The Soviets argued that Stalin
was simply playing for time,
letting Hitler and the Western
powers kill each other off.
Perhaps Stalin, who intended to grab
the Baltic states and part of Poland,
even deluded himself that he
could share Europe with Hitler.
Hitler himself had some explaining
to do to the Nazi chiefs.
This pact with Stalin
was a shock for them.
He explained to the heads
of the SS and the Gestapo,
Heydrich and Himmler, to his
right-hand man, Bormann,
and to a few close collaborators,
that the temporary alliance
left him free to continue his
expansion, this time into Poland.
For the rest of the world, the
German-Soviet Pact meant war.
In 1936, the US Congress had
passed the Neutrality Act
to avoid being dragged into
a European war once again.
So, with nothing to fear either from
the United States or from Russia,
Hitler decided to wipe out what
he called the "worst monstrosity"
of the Versailles Treaty
- the Danzig Corridor.
In 1919, German territory
had been cut in two
in order to give Poland
access to the sea.
Hitler launched his
invasion of Poland at dawn
on Friday the 1st
of September 1939.
The first shots of the Second
World War were fired on Danzig.
Hitler was convinced that the French
and British would not take action.
Yet the two governments met immediately
and sent him an ultimatum,
demanding that he halt all
military action against Poland.
Hitler declared,
"Our enemies are little worms,
incapable of making a real decision."
And he added, "Who wants
to get bogged down
"in a world war for Danzig?"
3rd September, 1939.
At 11am, the ambassador of
Great Britain in Berlin
delivered a declaration of war.
At 5pm, France declared
war on Germany.
Hitler could hardly believe it.
His interpreter, Schmidt, wrote,
"It was like he was petrified,
staring into the distance."
General Jodl remarked,
"For the first time,
"the Fuhrer's
instinct was wrong."
German generals found themselves
facing their worst-case scenario,
a war on two fronts.
But the die was cast.
Hitler unleashed the Wehrmacht,
the armed forces of Nazi Germany,
onto Poland.
ROCKET WHOOSHES
EXPLOSION
Going into battle as
if in a bygone age,
the Polish cavalry charged the
German tanks and was slaughtered.
Paris. General Mobilisation.
Nobody wanted to fight this war,
not like the last time in 1914,
when everyone marched off
to battle in high spirits
with flowers in their rifles.
This time there were no flowers
and no rifles.
Once again, men and women said
tearful farewells to each other.
The French Army headed for
the German border on foot
with their officers
following on horseback.
At the time, armies still
relied heavily on horses
and these were
requisitioned everywhere.
Motorisation had not kept up.
Gaston Sirec,
a driver of one of these outdated
trucks with solid rubber tires.
"There was such a
shortage of equipment.
"We had one rifle
for two per truck.
"We had one box of ten bullets,
which we weren't allowed to open.
"It was pathetic!
"If we'd had what we
needed, we'd have fought,
"because we're no great
friends of the Boche."
The Boche, the pejorative
nickname for German soldiers
during the previous war,
were also named Krauts, Jerries,
Huns, Fritzes, Heinies.
They were also called Doryphores,
meaning potato beetles, parasites.
But just who were these Boche?
They were young, highly-motivated
Germans, marching as they sang,
"Our flag is waving before us.
"Our flag is a new age."
"Our flag is stronger
than death."
August von Kageneck was a
typical young German officer.
"I thought that a military
career was the right choice.
"My parents thought so as well.
"My father would tell me,
'At least there you can
still open your mouth
and say what you like,
"'and you don't have to
do that Nazi salute.'"
In September 1939,
von Kageneck was still training
to become a tank commander.
"My father, who was a general,
"was telling me, 'The French
have 40 divisions on the border.
"'We have 15.
"'All the rest are in Poland.
500,000 men against 200,000.'
"They outnumbered
us two-to-one."
So, confident French
forces attacked
on 7th September, 1939, four
days after declaring war.
This offensive, launched to show
public opinion that Poland had not
been abandoned, advanced five
miles into German territory.
German civilians were the first to
take to the roads fleeing the combat.
The French Army's
cinema department
showed off the spoils of war -
bicycles.
TRANSLATION FROM
FRENCH FILM BROADCAST
But the offensive soon came to a halt and
degenerated into a series of skirmishes,
raids by elite commandos led
by the hero Joseph Darnand,
who received the citation of
"Premier Soldier of France".
Later, he became one of the most
rabid collaborators with the Germans
and after the war
he was executed.
The French Army,
in spite of its heroes and
its superiority in numbers,
took no further action.
General Maurice Gamelin,
67 years old, was commander in chief of
the Allied Franco-British Land Forces.
The French massively
outnumbered the British,
who also thought the
war wasn't for real
and that it would
all be over soon.
Gamelin himself had no desire
to re-fight the war of 1914.
He wanted to avoid another
bloodbath at any cost.
He wanted two more years behind the
Maginot Line to rearm the country.
The Maginot Line was the vast complex
of fortifications, built to stop
the German enemy
once and for all.
It took 16 years to construct
and swallowed up one-and-a-half
million cubic yards of concrete
and 150,000 tons of steel.
All these gun turrets were linked
together by a labyrinth of tunnels
stretching 300 miles from the
Swiss border to Luxembourg.
200,000 men were
stationed there.
The Maginot Line ended at the
foot of the Ardennes forest.
The French Military Command thought
that German tanks could never cross
this extremely rough terrain.
The French hadn't extended the
line to the sea because Belgium,
an ally of France,
had opposed it.
This northern part of the front
was manned by the French Army
and the British
Expeditionary Force,
later reinforced by Canadians and troops
from all around the British Empire.
CHEERING
They adopted a
snappy theme song.
♪ We're going to
hang out the washing
♪ On the Siegfried Line
♪ "Have you any dirty washing
♪ "Mother, dear?" ♪
The Siegfried Line was the string of
fortifications constructed by Hitler
facing the Maginot Line.
Unfortunately, nothing was going to
be as easy as the song suggested.
♪ We're going to hang
out the washing... ♪
September, 1939.
During the invasion of Poland,
the Germans stationed
on the French border
stared across at the
French defences.
But they didn't attack.
They were desperate to
avoid a second front.
The French still took
some precautions.
They evacuated the population
of Alsace and Lorraine
to the southwest of France.
These people had been thrown
back and forth between
France and Germany by the
successive tides of war.
Strasbourg became a ghost town.
Its population had taken
everything they could carry,
even from their churches...
..and synagogues.
On 20th September, Hitler
ordered the bombing of Warsaw.
The city was surrounded but
was still holding out.
BOMB WHINES
EXPLOSIONS
BOMB WHINES
SIRENS WAIL
The Fuhrer wanted to strike
terror into the hearts and minds,
not only of the Poles, but of
the French and British as well.
He wanted them to think, "This
is what's in store for us."
The world was horrified.
In New York, the bombing of Warsaw
was up in lights in Times Square,
and on the front page
of all the newspapers.
Franklin D. Roosevelt, the
President of the United States,
addressed the nation.
This nation will remain
a neutral nation.
But I cannot ask
that every American
remain neutral in
thought as well.
Even a neutral
has a right to take
account of facts.
Even a neutral
cannot be asked
to close his mind
or to close his conscience.
The bombing of Warsaw showed
how vulnerable cities were.
Paris set about
protecting its monuments
and transferring its museums'
masterpieces into the provinces.
The Champ de Mars, at the
foot the Eiffel Tower,
was dug full of bomb shelters.
And there were frequent
air-raid drills.
AIR-RAID SIREN BLARES
Gas masks were compulsory.
Poison gases had been used
in the First World War
and now everyone was afraid
they would be used again.
Even the horses had
to be protected.
Meanwhile, Poland was being
ruthlessly carved up.
DISTANT EXPLOSIONS
As previously agreed with Hitler,
the Russians had invaded
the eastern half of Poland.
Here, German and Soviet
soldiers were fraternising,
so incongruous in the light
of what would happen later.
The Nazis handed out flyers
that read, "The German Army
"salutes the Red Army of workers and
farmers, which it has always held
"in the highest respect."
The Polish Army surrendered
in the west to the Germans,
and in the east to the Soviets.
Stalin then ordered the execution
of 20,000 Polish prisoners.
He wanted to eliminate the elite of
this country he intended to annexe.
4,500 Polish officers were
executed with a bullet in the head
in the Katyn Forest,
near Smolensk in Russia.
Two years later, at the Kremlin,
Stalin met with the head of the
Polish government in exile,
General Sikorski, who delivered a
list of missing Polish officers.
Stalin acted surprised and
promised to investigate.
50 years later, in 1992, the
president of post-Soviet Russia,
Boris Yeltsin, would present
the Polish president
with the original
order of execution
signed by Stalin himself.
But by occupying half of Poland,
Stalin was playing into
the hands of Hitler,
who needed a common border with the
USSR for his plans to invade Russia.
Hitler and Himmler,
the head of the SS,
would now take care of Poland
by naming the Nazi, Hans Frank,
as Governor-General of the
occupied Polish provinces.
He declared,
"I have the power of life and
death over the Polish people."
After the war, he was tried
at Nuremberg and hanged
for crimes against humanity.
These gypsies, held in a pen,
were filmed by a German.
For the Nazis, they
were "non-persons".
The women were forced to
undergo sterilisation
because "they did not
deserve to reproduce".
The Nazis declared "open
season" on gypsies.
Hundreds of thousands would be
interned in concentration camps.
The ordeal of the Jewish
people was just beginning.
The Nazis now had three million
Polish Jews at their mercy.
Hitler was still uncertain
about what to do with them.
As long as the war was going
well for him, he considered
deporting them to the East or
even shipping them to Madagascar.
It was only later, when the outcome
of the war became less certain,
that Hitler and his henchmen unleashed
a frenzy of hate and murder.
The Final Solution.
For the time being, the
Jews had to be identified,
marked with a yellow star
and herded into ghettos,
some of which were
completely walled off.
From the diary of one of
these unfortunate victims.
"It's heartrending to see the
shameful scenes of violence
"that take place
before our eyes.
"Women and old folks beaten right
out in the streets by petty thugs.
"Tears come to my eyes.
All our powerlessness,
"all our isolation
is there to see
"right in the open, where not a
single person takes our defence.
"We are so weak."
All the major cities of Poland
would have their ghetto-prisons,
where German, Austrian and
Czech Jews were also interned.
The Jews here still felt
confident that perhaps, one day,
they'd be able to
return to their homes.
They didn't know that they
would die of hunger and cold.
That the Shoah was
about to begin.
Warsaw was in ruins.
Hitler visited the city,
filmed by a propaganda crew
seen here in a travelling car
in the background.
These victorious German soldiers
marched their goose step
to the sound of the
Grenadiers' March,
but in fact, all sorts of failings had
emerged during the Polish campaign.
Poor preparation, a
lack of fighting spirit
and even cases of
indiscipline were the points
that the commander in chief, General von
Brauchitsch, dared report to the Fuhrer.
Hitler was furious, but he was
immune to doubt and ordered plans
to be made for his attack on the
West, an attack on The Netherlands,
Belgium and France.
The generals thought
it was madness.
Some of them began plotting
to overthrow the Fuhrer.
It was a crucial moment.
The course of history
could have been changed.
EXPLOSION
8th November, 1939.
Hitler narrowly escaped
an assassination attempt.
It seemed as though he enjoyed
some kind of divine protection.
By the time he attended the
funeral for the victims,
his power over the army and the German
people had grown even stronger.
He told his generals, "My
decision is irrevocable.
"I will attack France
when the time is right.
"I will be victorious
or die in the attempt."
Eventually, he postponed
the order to attack
and went back to his
retreat in the Alps
to join his mistress, Eva Braun.
She shot this footage
of Hitler's entourage,
of the Reich's
architect, Albert Speer,
who went for long
walks withHitler.
Speer later recalled...
"Hitler wanted to re-christen
Berlin "Germania".
"We already had a mock-up of
the future Adolf Hitler Square
"with a dome inspired by St. Peter's
of Rome, but 17 times bigger.
"I said to him, 'My Fuhrer,
wouldn't that make
"'an ideal target for bombers?'
"He answered, 'Not at all.
"'Goering has assured me
"'that no enemy aircraft will
ever fly over the Reich.'"
From his barracks, the
future German officer,
August von Kageneck,
wrote to his mother.
"We're all eager to fight.
We're ready for battle."
His mother answered...
"This war is a crime and we're
going to have to pay for it."
Autumn, 1939.
The war had entered a
new, bizarre phase.
The Germans called it the
Sitzkrieg, the Sitting War.
The British called
it the Phoney War.
And for the French, it was
the "drole de guerre".
The Bore War.
It was a strange waiting period,
especially hard on the women.
For them, there was not
only the anguish of war,
but also the survival of their
families to worry about.
Just as in the Great War,
the soldiers dug in and
tried to make the best of things.
The French soldier Gaston Sirec
wrote to his wife.
"It's 30 degrees below zero.
"The bread is frozen.
"I'm one of the lucky ones
- they gave us some straw
"and with that we
can sleep better."
The winter of '39 to '40 was one
of the coldest of the century.
As would be many of the winters of
this war, to make things even worse.
The commander in chief, General
Gamelin, expected the Germans
to attack through Belgium
and to move towards Paris
across this open plain,
as they had done in 1914.
Gamelin planned to make his stand
against the Germans on Belgian soil.
In France, Colonel de Gaulle, a
tank officer who was beginning to
make a name for himself,
criticised this strategy.
He called it the
"Maginot-Line Mentality" -
simply waiting for the other
side to make the first move.
In his book, Towards A Professional
Army, he argued in favour of taking
the offensive, making
massive use of tanks.
France's factories were
producing 300 tanks a month,
but they were being dispersed to all
regions to back up the infantry.
French aviation had
also fallen behind.
France had ordered 4,000
planes from the United States,
in spite of the ever-growing
isolationist trend
led by Charles Lindbergh,
the hero who had made the first
transatlantic solo flight,
and who was now leader of
the America First movement.
If you believe in an independent
destiny for America,
if you believe that this country
should not enter the war in Europe,
we ask you to join the America
First committee in its stand.
This was a conservative voice of
America and of public personalities
like Henry Ford, the
anti-Semitic car producer.
Or like Joseph Kennedy, America's
ambassador in London, a pro-German.
Whereas his son, John, the
future President Kennedy,
supported the
European democracies.
The very active American Nazis
contributed to the impassioned
climate that ruled at
the beginning of 1940.
In London, the British fascists
were also active, right up to
the moment they were banned.
Oswald Mosley, "The
English Fuhrer",
openly marched against the
government in the centre of London.
He would spend the rest
of the war in prison.
His slogan, "Stop
War", was inspired
by the German Nazis who were seeking
a separate peace with England.
But Winston Churchill had
joined the British government.
"We have to take the offensive,"
he insisted over and over again
to the French generals on an
official visit to London.
A Franco-British expeditionary
corps was formed to help Finland,
which was suddenly attacked
by the Soviet Union.
France prepared to send its elite
soldiers, the French Foreign Legion.
The Foreign Legion.
For a century, it had been
taking in the world's reprobates
no matter what their past,
as long as it wasn't too shady.
In their headquarters in Algeria, a
good number of Spanish Republicans
now signed up, having
fled their country
after Franco's fascist victory.
They were now eager to fight the
Nazis who had supported Franco.
The Legionnaires embarked at Brest
along with the "Chasseurs Alpins",
a mountain corps trained
for action in the snow.
But Finland signed a peace
treaty with Russia.
At the same time, Hitler
launched a surprise offensive
against Denmark and Norway.
A Blitzkrieg, or
"lightning war".
The Wehrmacht captured
Oslo in two days.
Hitler wanted to protect
the Iron Route.
Iron was indispensable to the German
war effort, and 50% of its iron ore
came from Sweden, a supposedly
neutral country, and was shipped
out of the Norwegian
port of Narvik.
A Franco-British expeditionary corps
arrived in the fjord of Narvik.
After a month of fighting and 5,000
dead and wounded, they took Narvik.
The Allies proudly announced,
"The Iron Route is cut".
This victory did a lot to restore
French and British morale.
"We will win because
we are the strongest",
was the new French motto.
But within days, the expeditionary
corps abandoned Narvik,
and for the rest of the war,
trainload after trainload
of Swedish iron ore would
feed the German war machine.
On 9th May, 1940,
Hitler left Berlin on his private
train heading towards Norway.
Then, halfway there, the
train changed direction
and headed for his new headquarters
near the French border.
His generals had submitted
their battle plan to him
during the winter.
It looked the same as in 1914.
Attack through Belgium.
But Hitler preferred General
von Manstein's idea.
He explained...
"We have to make them believe
we're attacking through Belgium.
"The Allies will
go to the rescue.
"It's a trap. We'll cut straight
through the Ardennes Forest,
"then we'll swing up and
drive towards the sea.
"We'll encircle them with
a sickle cut movement."
But this was a huge gamble
because the Allies could turn
back and counter attack.
However, Hitler was confident.
He declared, "The main thing
is to have good weather."
Lieutenant August von Kageneck.
"We are the Wehrmacht, the Armed
Forces of Greater Germany.
"Victory is certain."
These soldiers embodied
the Nazi fighting spirit.
They were the end product
of the military discipline
inherited from the Prussian Army
and now fanaticised by the Nazis.
For them, their
homeland was in danger.
After all, it was the French and
British who had declared war
on Germany.
10th May, 1940.
At dawn, German parachutists jump
over key targets in Holland.
Their mission was to capture
the airfields and bridges
around Rotterdam.
At the same time, Hitler unleashed
his war machine on Belgium.
Hitler watched and waited.
Would the Allies
fall into his trap?
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd
Adolf Hitler's 56th birthday.
With the Soviet Red
Army closing in,
Hitler came up from his
bunker to make one last
appearance for the cameras,
to meet the boys who were now almost
the only ones still fighting for him.
10 days later, Hitler was dead.
A few weeks later, the
war in Europe was over.
The Second World War
left 50 million dead,
many more civilians
than military.
This series is the epic
story of that war...
..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.
Berlin in the early 1930s.
A lively, vibrant city.
Marlene Dietrich
sang The Blue Angel.
Artists and writers gathered
to exchange ideas in the shade
of the lime trees on
avenue Unter den Linden.
Berlin was a major cultural centre
of Europe, one of the most open
and tolerant cities
in the world.
SHE SINGS IN GERMAN
Then, in 1933, all that changed.
Through intimidation and violence,
Hitler and his armed militias like
the SA seized
control of Germany.
Their hymn was the
"Horst Wessel" song.
CROWD SINGS HORST WESSEL
The Nazis took advantage of the
fact that the socialist parties
in Germany were divided.
It almost seemed that Hitler, with his
raised fist revolutionary salute,
wanted to win their support.
German Communists took
their orders from Moscow.
The Kremlin saw the
Social-Democrats as the true enemy.
No alliance was
possible with them.
For the last time, German
Communists sang The Internationale.
Hitler came to power, perfectly
legally, on the 30th of January 1933.
Within a few months, his
dictatorship was firmly in place.
He became the
Fuhrer, the Leader.
All of Germany had to rise
and chant, "Heil Hitler!".
However, not all Germans
were convinced,
so Hitler continued to hammer home
his simplistic nationalist slogans.
CHEERING
And he eventually won people
over with his remarkable power
of persuasion over the masses.
In his book, Mein Kampf
- My Struggle -
Hitler clearly laid out what
he called his "missions".
As one of the embittered veterans
of the First World War, his first
mission was to destroy France,
to wipe out the humiliation of
the Versailles Treaty of 1919
that stripped Germany of its army
and part of its territory.
He wanted to conquer what he called
"lebensraum" - living space.
Germany had a population of 80
million, twice that of France.
He wanted to make Germany
a world superpower.
A pathological anti-Semite,
Hitler also took on the mission
of asserting the superiority
of the Germanic Aryan race,
menaced, he believed,
by the Jews.
For him, the Jews were the cause of
the Great War, of Germany's defeat,
of inflation and unemployment.
The next war would be
a war on the Jews.
To start with, they were sent to
Dachau, the first concentration camp,
where Hitler also locked up
the anti-Nazis - communists,
social-democrats and others.
Hitler also believed it
was his mission to bring
all the German-speaking peoples
into the Greater Reich, beginning
with those of his
homeland, Austria.
In 1938, Austria was annexed and then
submitted to the same reign of terror
as Germany, with the opening of one
of the most infamous concentration
camps at Mauthausen near Linz.
Hitler visited the village of his
birth in Austria and the schoolhouse
where, in 1899, like these
poor, barefoot children,
he had been a pupil.
His next victim would be
neighbouring Czechoslovakia,
where there was a German
population, the Sudeten Germans.
But the country was under the
protection of England and France.
A crisis followed.
Munich, temple of
Nazism, September 1938.
An 11th hour peace conference.
On one side, Adolf Hitler,
and his ally, the Italian
dictator Benito Mussolini.
On the other side, the
western democracies.
Neville Chamberlain, the
Conservative British Prime Minister,
and the radical-socialist French
Premier Edouard Daladier.
They ended up accepting
the unacceptable -
they gave up the Czech province
of Sudetenland to Hitler
in exchange for his
solemn promise
to make no more claims on any
other European territory.
But just six months later,
in March 1939,
Hitler invaded the
rest of Czechoslovakia
and entered Prague accompanied
by Marshal Hermann Goering.
Goering, a former
First World War
fighter pilot, one of the founders of
the Nazi Party, was the Air Minister.
Hitler no longer needed the excuse
of reuniting German-speaking people.
He could now take over all of
Czechoslovakia's powerful industries.
The Allies did
nothing to stop him.
The Soviet Union was the only
nation left to counter Hitler.
It had signed a mutual
assistance treaty with France.
The Union of Soviet Socialist
Republics was the official name
of Communist Russia.
Behind the mass parades in Red
Square was the iron-fisted
dictatorship of Stalin, who had also
thrown millions into his camps.
Industrialisation and
forced militarisation
had made the USSR a major power.
Despite their fear of Communism,
the Western powers relied
on the Soviet Union.
But Hitler and Stalin were
about to stun the world.
Summer, 1939.
In his Berchtesgaden retreat, with
his Minister of Foreign Affairs,
Joachim von Ribbentrop,
Hitler prepared an
extraordinary diplomatic coup.
Hitler, who had sworn to destroy
communism, sent Ribbentrop to Moscow
to sign a history-making treaty
with his deadliest enemy.
When Stalin's Foreign Affairs Minister,
Molotov, signed the German-Soviet Pact,
Communists in the West
were totally taken aback.
The Soviets argued that Stalin
was simply playing for time,
letting Hitler and the Western
powers kill each other off.
Perhaps Stalin, who intended to grab
the Baltic states and part of Poland,
even deluded himself that he
could share Europe with Hitler.
Hitler himself had some explaining
to do to the Nazi chiefs.
This pact with Stalin
was a shock for them.
He explained to the heads
of the SS and the Gestapo,
Heydrich and Himmler, to his
right-hand man, Bormann,
and to a few close collaborators,
that the temporary alliance
left him free to continue his
expansion, this time into Poland.
For the rest of the world, the
German-Soviet Pact meant war.
In 1936, the US Congress had
passed the Neutrality Act
to avoid being dragged into
a European war once again.
So, with nothing to fear either from
the United States or from Russia,
Hitler decided to wipe out what
he called the "worst monstrosity"
of the Versailles Treaty
- the Danzig Corridor.
In 1919, German territory
had been cut in two
in order to give Poland
access to the sea.
Hitler launched his
invasion of Poland at dawn
on Friday the 1st
of September 1939.
The first shots of the Second
World War were fired on Danzig.
Hitler was convinced that the French
and British would not take action.
Yet the two governments met immediately
and sent him an ultimatum,
demanding that he halt all
military action against Poland.
Hitler declared,
"Our enemies are little worms,
incapable of making a real decision."
And he added, "Who wants
to get bogged down
"in a world war for Danzig?"
3rd September, 1939.
At 11am, the ambassador of
Great Britain in Berlin
delivered a declaration of war.
At 5pm, France declared
war on Germany.
Hitler could hardly believe it.
His interpreter, Schmidt, wrote,
"It was like he was petrified,
staring into the distance."
General Jodl remarked,
"For the first time,
"the Fuhrer's
instinct was wrong."
German generals found themselves
facing their worst-case scenario,
a war on two fronts.
But the die was cast.
Hitler unleashed the Wehrmacht,
the armed forces of Nazi Germany,
onto Poland.
ROCKET WHOOSHES
EXPLOSION
Going into battle as
if in a bygone age,
the Polish cavalry charged the
German tanks and was slaughtered.
Paris. General Mobilisation.
Nobody wanted to fight this war,
not like the last time in 1914,
when everyone marched off
to battle in high spirits
with flowers in their rifles.
This time there were no flowers
and no rifles.
Once again, men and women said
tearful farewells to each other.
The French Army headed for
the German border on foot
with their officers
following on horseback.
At the time, armies still
relied heavily on horses
and these were
requisitioned everywhere.
Motorisation had not kept up.
Gaston Sirec,
a driver of one of these outdated
trucks with solid rubber tires.
"There was such a
shortage of equipment.
"We had one rifle
for two per truck.
"We had one box of ten bullets,
which we weren't allowed to open.
"It was pathetic!
"If we'd had what we
needed, we'd have fought,
"because we're no great
friends of the Boche."
The Boche, the pejorative
nickname for German soldiers
during the previous war,
were also named Krauts, Jerries,
Huns, Fritzes, Heinies.
They were also called Doryphores,
meaning potato beetles, parasites.
But just who were these Boche?
They were young, highly-motivated
Germans, marching as they sang,
"Our flag is waving before us.
"Our flag is a new age."
"Our flag is stronger
than death."
August von Kageneck was a
typical young German officer.
"I thought that a military
career was the right choice.
"My parents thought so as well.
"My father would tell me,
'At least there you can
still open your mouth
and say what you like,
"'and you don't have to
do that Nazi salute.'"
In September 1939,
von Kageneck was still training
to become a tank commander.
"My father, who was a general,
"was telling me, 'The French
have 40 divisions on the border.
"'We have 15.
"'All the rest are in Poland.
500,000 men against 200,000.'
"They outnumbered
us two-to-one."
So, confident French
forces attacked
on 7th September, 1939, four
days after declaring war.
This offensive, launched to show
public opinion that Poland had not
been abandoned, advanced five
miles into German territory.
German civilians were the first to
take to the roads fleeing the combat.
The French Army's
cinema department
showed off the spoils of war -
bicycles.
TRANSLATION FROM
FRENCH FILM BROADCAST
But the offensive soon came to a halt and
degenerated into a series of skirmishes,
raids by elite commandos led
by the hero Joseph Darnand,
who received the citation of
"Premier Soldier of France".
Later, he became one of the most
rabid collaborators with the Germans
and after the war
he was executed.
The French Army,
in spite of its heroes and
its superiority in numbers,
took no further action.
General Maurice Gamelin,
67 years old, was commander in chief of
the Allied Franco-British Land Forces.
The French massively
outnumbered the British,
who also thought the
war wasn't for real
and that it would
all be over soon.
Gamelin himself had no desire
to re-fight the war of 1914.
He wanted to avoid another
bloodbath at any cost.
He wanted two more years behind the
Maginot Line to rearm the country.
The Maginot Line was the vast complex
of fortifications, built to stop
the German enemy
once and for all.
It took 16 years to construct
and swallowed up one-and-a-half
million cubic yards of concrete
and 150,000 tons of steel.
All these gun turrets were linked
together by a labyrinth of tunnels
stretching 300 miles from the
Swiss border to Luxembourg.
200,000 men were
stationed there.
The Maginot Line ended at the
foot of the Ardennes forest.
The French Military Command thought
that German tanks could never cross
this extremely rough terrain.
The French hadn't extended the
line to the sea because Belgium,
an ally of France,
had opposed it.
This northern part of the front
was manned by the French Army
and the British
Expeditionary Force,
later reinforced by Canadians and troops
from all around the British Empire.
CHEERING
They adopted a
snappy theme song.
♪ We're going to
hang out the washing
♪ On the Siegfried Line
♪ "Have you any dirty washing
♪ "Mother, dear?" ♪
The Siegfried Line was the string of
fortifications constructed by Hitler
facing the Maginot Line.
Unfortunately, nothing was going to
be as easy as the song suggested.
♪ We're going to hang
out the washing... ♪
September, 1939.
During the invasion of Poland,
the Germans stationed
on the French border
stared across at the
French defences.
But they didn't attack.
They were desperate to
avoid a second front.
The French still took
some precautions.
They evacuated the population
of Alsace and Lorraine
to the southwest of France.
These people had been thrown
back and forth between
France and Germany by the
successive tides of war.
Strasbourg became a ghost town.
Its population had taken
everything they could carry,
even from their churches...
..and synagogues.
On 20th September, Hitler
ordered the bombing of Warsaw.
The city was surrounded but
was still holding out.
BOMB WHINES
EXPLOSIONS
BOMB WHINES
SIRENS WAIL
The Fuhrer wanted to strike
terror into the hearts and minds,
not only of the Poles, but of
the French and British as well.
He wanted them to think, "This
is what's in store for us."
The world was horrified.
In New York, the bombing of Warsaw
was up in lights in Times Square,
and on the front page
of all the newspapers.
Franklin D. Roosevelt, the
President of the United States,
addressed the nation.
This nation will remain
a neutral nation.
But I cannot ask
that every American
remain neutral in
thought as well.
Even a neutral
has a right to take
account of facts.
Even a neutral
cannot be asked
to close his mind
or to close his conscience.
The bombing of Warsaw showed
how vulnerable cities were.
Paris set about
protecting its monuments
and transferring its museums'
masterpieces into the provinces.
The Champ de Mars, at the
foot the Eiffel Tower,
was dug full of bomb shelters.
And there were frequent
air-raid drills.
AIR-RAID SIREN BLARES
Gas masks were compulsory.
Poison gases had been used
in the First World War
and now everyone was afraid
they would be used again.
Even the horses had
to be protected.
Meanwhile, Poland was being
ruthlessly carved up.
DISTANT EXPLOSIONS
As previously agreed with Hitler,
the Russians had invaded
the eastern half of Poland.
Here, German and Soviet
soldiers were fraternising,
so incongruous in the light
of what would happen later.
The Nazis handed out flyers
that read, "The German Army
"salutes the Red Army of workers and
farmers, which it has always held
"in the highest respect."
The Polish Army surrendered
in the west to the Germans,
and in the east to the Soviets.
Stalin then ordered the execution
of 20,000 Polish prisoners.
He wanted to eliminate the elite of
this country he intended to annexe.
4,500 Polish officers were
executed with a bullet in the head
in the Katyn Forest,
near Smolensk in Russia.
Two years later, at the Kremlin,
Stalin met with the head of the
Polish government in exile,
General Sikorski, who delivered a
list of missing Polish officers.
Stalin acted surprised and
promised to investigate.
50 years later, in 1992, the
president of post-Soviet Russia,
Boris Yeltsin, would present
the Polish president
with the original
order of execution
signed by Stalin himself.
But by occupying half of Poland,
Stalin was playing into
the hands of Hitler,
who needed a common border with the
USSR for his plans to invade Russia.
Hitler and Himmler,
the head of the SS,
would now take care of Poland
by naming the Nazi, Hans Frank,
as Governor-General of the
occupied Polish provinces.
He declared,
"I have the power of life and
death over the Polish people."
After the war, he was tried
at Nuremberg and hanged
for crimes against humanity.
These gypsies, held in a pen,
were filmed by a German.
For the Nazis, they
were "non-persons".
The women were forced to
undergo sterilisation
because "they did not
deserve to reproduce".
The Nazis declared "open
season" on gypsies.
Hundreds of thousands would be
interned in concentration camps.
The ordeal of the Jewish
people was just beginning.
The Nazis now had three million
Polish Jews at their mercy.
Hitler was still uncertain
about what to do with them.
As long as the war was going
well for him, he considered
deporting them to the East or
even shipping them to Madagascar.
It was only later, when the outcome
of the war became less certain,
that Hitler and his henchmen unleashed
a frenzy of hate and murder.
The Final Solution.
For the time being, the
Jews had to be identified,
marked with a yellow star
and herded into ghettos,
some of which were
completely walled off.
From the diary of one of
these unfortunate victims.
"It's heartrending to see the
shameful scenes of violence
"that take place
before our eyes.
"Women and old folks beaten right
out in the streets by petty thugs.
"Tears come to my eyes.
All our powerlessness,
"all our isolation
is there to see
"right in the open, where not a
single person takes our defence.
"We are so weak."
All the major cities of Poland
would have their ghetto-prisons,
where German, Austrian and
Czech Jews were also interned.
The Jews here still felt
confident that perhaps, one day,
they'd be able to
return to their homes.
They didn't know that they
would die of hunger and cold.
That the Shoah was
about to begin.
Warsaw was in ruins.
Hitler visited the city,
filmed by a propaganda crew
seen here in a travelling car
in the background.
These victorious German soldiers
marched their goose step
to the sound of the
Grenadiers' March,
but in fact, all sorts of failings had
emerged during the Polish campaign.
Poor preparation, a
lack of fighting spirit
and even cases of
indiscipline were the points
that the commander in chief, General von
Brauchitsch, dared report to the Fuhrer.
Hitler was furious, but he was
immune to doubt and ordered plans
to be made for his attack on the
West, an attack on The Netherlands,
Belgium and France.
The generals thought
it was madness.
Some of them began plotting
to overthrow the Fuhrer.
It was a crucial moment.
The course of history
could have been changed.
EXPLOSION
8th November, 1939.
Hitler narrowly escaped
an assassination attempt.
It seemed as though he enjoyed
some kind of divine protection.
By the time he attended the
funeral for the victims,
his power over the army and the German
people had grown even stronger.
He told his generals, "My
decision is irrevocable.
"I will attack France
when the time is right.
"I will be victorious
or die in the attempt."
Eventually, he postponed
the order to attack
and went back to his
retreat in the Alps
to join his mistress, Eva Braun.
She shot this footage
of Hitler's entourage,
of the Reich's
architect, Albert Speer,
who went for long
walks withHitler.
Speer later recalled...
"Hitler wanted to re-christen
Berlin "Germania".
"We already had a mock-up of
the future Adolf Hitler Square
"with a dome inspired by St. Peter's
of Rome, but 17 times bigger.
"I said to him, 'My Fuhrer,
wouldn't that make
"'an ideal target for bombers?'
"He answered, 'Not at all.
"'Goering has assured me
"'that no enemy aircraft will
ever fly over the Reich.'"
From his barracks, the
future German officer,
August von Kageneck,
wrote to his mother.
"We're all eager to fight.
We're ready for battle."
His mother answered...
"This war is a crime and we're
going to have to pay for it."
Autumn, 1939.
The war had entered a
new, bizarre phase.
The Germans called it the
Sitzkrieg, the Sitting War.
The British called
it the Phoney War.
And for the French, it was
the "drole de guerre".
The Bore War.
It was a strange waiting period,
especially hard on the women.
For them, there was not
only the anguish of war,
but also the survival of their
families to worry about.
Just as in the Great War,
the soldiers dug in and
tried to make the best of things.
The French soldier Gaston Sirec
wrote to his wife.
"It's 30 degrees below zero.
"The bread is frozen.
"I'm one of the lucky ones
- they gave us some straw
"and with that we
can sleep better."
The winter of '39 to '40 was one
of the coldest of the century.
As would be many of the winters of
this war, to make things even worse.
The commander in chief, General
Gamelin, expected the Germans
to attack through Belgium
and to move towards Paris
across this open plain,
as they had done in 1914.
Gamelin planned to make his stand
against the Germans on Belgian soil.
In France, Colonel de Gaulle, a
tank officer who was beginning to
make a name for himself,
criticised this strategy.
He called it the
"Maginot-Line Mentality" -
simply waiting for the other
side to make the first move.
In his book, Towards A Professional
Army, he argued in favour of taking
the offensive, making
massive use of tanks.
France's factories were
producing 300 tanks a month,
but they were being dispersed to all
regions to back up the infantry.
French aviation had
also fallen behind.
France had ordered 4,000
planes from the United States,
in spite of the ever-growing
isolationist trend
led by Charles Lindbergh,
the hero who had made the first
transatlantic solo flight,
and who was now leader of
the America First movement.
If you believe in an independent
destiny for America,
if you believe that this country
should not enter the war in Europe,
we ask you to join the America
First committee in its stand.
This was a conservative voice of
America and of public personalities
like Henry Ford, the
anti-Semitic car producer.
Or like Joseph Kennedy, America's
ambassador in London, a pro-German.
Whereas his son, John, the
future President Kennedy,
supported the
European democracies.
The very active American Nazis
contributed to the impassioned
climate that ruled at
the beginning of 1940.
In London, the British fascists
were also active, right up to
the moment they were banned.
Oswald Mosley, "The
English Fuhrer",
openly marched against the
government in the centre of London.
He would spend the rest
of the war in prison.
His slogan, "Stop
War", was inspired
by the German Nazis who were seeking
a separate peace with England.
But Winston Churchill had
joined the British government.
"We have to take the offensive,"
he insisted over and over again
to the French generals on an
official visit to London.
A Franco-British expeditionary
corps was formed to help Finland,
which was suddenly attacked
by the Soviet Union.
France prepared to send its elite
soldiers, the French Foreign Legion.
The Foreign Legion.
For a century, it had been
taking in the world's reprobates
no matter what their past,
as long as it wasn't too shady.
In their headquarters in Algeria, a
good number of Spanish Republicans
now signed up, having
fled their country
after Franco's fascist victory.
They were now eager to fight the
Nazis who had supported Franco.
The Legionnaires embarked at Brest
along with the "Chasseurs Alpins",
a mountain corps trained
for action in the snow.
But Finland signed a peace
treaty with Russia.
At the same time, Hitler
launched a surprise offensive
against Denmark and Norway.
A Blitzkrieg, or
"lightning war".
The Wehrmacht captured
Oslo in two days.
Hitler wanted to protect
the Iron Route.
Iron was indispensable to the German
war effort, and 50% of its iron ore
came from Sweden, a supposedly
neutral country, and was shipped
out of the Norwegian
port of Narvik.
A Franco-British expeditionary corps
arrived in the fjord of Narvik.
After a month of fighting and 5,000
dead and wounded, they took Narvik.
The Allies proudly announced,
"The Iron Route is cut".
This victory did a lot to restore
French and British morale.
"We will win because
we are the strongest",
was the new French motto.
But within days, the expeditionary
corps abandoned Narvik,
and for the rest of the war,
trainload after trainload
of Swedish iron ore would
feed the German war machine.
On 9th May, 1940,
Hitler left Berlin on his private
train heading towards Norway.
Then, halfway there, the
train changed direction
and headed for his new headquarters
near the French border.
His generals had submitted
their battle plan to him
during the winter.
It looked the same as in 1914.
Attack through Belgium.
But Hitler preferred General
von Manstein's idea.
He explained...
"We have to make them believe
we're attacking through Belgium.
"The Allies will
go to the rescue.
"It's a trap. We'll cut straight
through the Ardennes Forest,
"then we'll swing up and
drive towards the sea.
"We'll encircle them with
a sickle cut movement."
But this was a huge gamble
because the Allies could turn
back and counter attack.
However, Hitler was confident.
He declared, "The main thing
is to have good weather."
Lieutenant August von Kageneck.
"We are the Wehrmacht, the Armed
Forces of Greater Germany.
"Victory is certain."
These soldiers embodied
the Nazi fighting spirit.
They were the end product
of the military discipline
inherited from the Prussian Army
and now fanaticised by the Nazis.
For them, their
homeland was in danger.
After all, it was the French and
British who had declared war
on Germany.
10th May, 1940.
At dawn, German parachutists jump
over key targets in Holland.
Their mission was to capture
the airfields and bridges
around Rotterdam.
At the same time, Hitler unleashed
his war machine on Belgium.
Hitler watched and waited.
Would the Allies
fall into his trap?
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd