Apocalypse: The Second World War (2009): Season 1, Episode 3 - Le choc - full transcript
As America joins the war and begins to re-arm, Hitler attacks the USSR to complete his domination of Europe before the U.S. can intervene.
Following Germany's
defeat of France,
Paris filled up
with Nazi soldiers.
Every day, at exactly 1pm,
the German Army paraded through
Paris - to show who was in charge.
The Germans now occupied the most
of the capital cities of Europe -
Prague and Warsaw,
Brussels, Luxembourg,
The Hague, Copenhagen and Oslo.
But not London... yet.
This series is the epic
story of World War Two,
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.
During the winter of
1940 Britain's cities
were devastated by German bombs.
But the country stood
firm around Churchill.
And American aid was sent
in by President Roosevelt.
Roosevelt was re-elected for
a third term as President
of the United States.
Though American opinion remained
opposed to joining the war,
he declared: We must become the
great arsenal of democracy.
But only some of the supplies
America sent to
Britain got through.
Every British ship at sea
was in great danger.
The Atlantic Ocean was crawling with
German submarines, the U-boats.
Through their periscopes, the U-boat
captains sought out British vessels.
Churchill was desperately worried.
He knew that if the supply convoys
failed to get through Britain
would be on its knees.
As an island nation, Britain was
reliant upon supplies from overseas.
The German U-boats now had
the French Atlantic
harbours at their disposal.
Operating in deadly groups,
using torpedoes and cannons,
these wolf packs succeeded
in sinking 4 million tons of
British shipping in 1941 alone.
Here, German submariners
toss loaves of bread
to a shipwrecked crew who have
almost no chance of surviving.
They would die of
thirst, of hunger,
of cold or by choking on oil.
Hitler was delighted
with the success of
hissubmarines, but America's huge
rearmament programme worried him.
He told his secretary,
Martin Bormann:
"In one year, the United States
will be ready to go to war.
"If we are to face them, we
need more raw 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 drew up a massive invasion
plan to invade the Soviet Union
called Operation Barbarossa, named
after the triumphant German Emperor.
The Wehrmacht started to
move its troops east.
Lieutenant von Kageneck
was one of the many thousands of
young officers who left for Poland.
He saw the debris from
the battles of 1939
piled up alongside the railway.
Polish prisoners and Jews had
been put to work on a massive
construction project.
Hitler wanted to build a
new autobahn, or motorway,
right across Poland to move his army
over to the new border with Russia.
This was where the 9th Panzer
Division was installed,
along with von Kageneck's regiment.
He wrote:
"Next to us is an SS unit.
"The commander asks us, 'Do you
want to see a Jew?' He makes a sign
"and a soldier brings
over a little man.
"'How many people have you stolen
from today?' The man doesn't reply.
"'Beat him 10 times with a
stick!' We were appalled.
"So this is our occupation of Poland?
We had heard vague stories of
"cruelty, but it was impossible
to know what was really going on.
"This country had become
the country of silence.
"We didn't know that this was
the beginning of the genocide
"to which we would lend
ourhands and our courage.
The 9th Panzer Division was ready to
attack, but the order didn't come.
So they went round
in circles, waiting.
At the last minute,
Hitler deferred his plans
for an offensive in the East.
He had to help out
his ally Mussolini
who had tried to fight his own
separate war and got into trouble.
The Duce's troops had been routed
by the British in North Africa.
125,000 Italian prisoners had
been taken by the British army.
To rescue Mussolini from disaster,
Hitler dispatched one of his best
generals to Libya, Erwin Rommel,
along with an armoured division.
In February 1941, this small
army of German soldiers known as
the Afrika Korps arrived
in North Africa.
They had no idea what
lay in store for them.
In Germany, Rommel was already
a big hero: he was the man
whohad taken Cambrai, Rouen and
Cherbourg in May and June of 1940.
And he was a true Nazi, a devoted
supporter who had served Hitler
with zeal and efficiency
from the very beginning.
Rommel believed in tanks, in
blitzkrieg, or lightning war.
On the first evening
after their arrival,
he ordered the Afrika Korps
to pursue the British
Army, with rapid success.
These Australian and South
African prisoners had come
to fight alongside the British.
Now they would spend
the rest of the war
in a German
prisoner-of-war camp.
Rommel soon began to
make a name for himself.
The British circulated his
picture with the caption:
"This man is dangerous."
Hitler attacked Greece,
a country that
Mussolini had already
tried to take.
After invading Yugoslavia, he dropped
his paratroopers over Crete.
Hitler had at last secured
his southern flank
for the invasion of Russia, but
he had lost precious time.
Operation Barbarossa had been
delayed by several weeks.
First of May 1941.
A great military parade was traditionally
held in Moscow's Red Square
every year to celebrate
International Labour Day.
But this year, the
parade was special.
Stalin wanted to make a big
impression on the Germans.
Although he had been
receiving information from
his spies warning that
an attack was imminent,
he found it impossible to believe
that Hitler would dare to break
the German-Soviet
Non-Aggression Pact so soon.
And senior German officers
were attending this parade.
Marshal Timoshenko, the People's
Commissar and Stalin's Defence Minister,
appeared to salute them
with great respect.
The German army later argued that
this display of military force
was proof that Stalin planned
to strike them first.
Churchill passed on intelligence reports
to Stalin that Hitler was about to invade.
But Stalin ignored them.
Just as he ignored a message sent
by a Soviet spy based in Tokyo.
The document, dated 30 May 1941,
warned of an imminent German attack.
Stalin actually continued to
send raw materials to the Reich.
Since the signing of the
German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact,
he had exported thousands of tons of
oil, chrome and nickel to Germany -
all of which helped Hitler's
armies conquer Western Europe.
A trainload was sent off on the
night of the 21st of June 1941.
Carrying 1000 tons of wheat,
this train crossed over
the border at midnight.
On that same morning, at 3am,
without officially declaring war,
the first Wehrmacht sappers crept
forward into Russian territory.
They were followed by
153 German divisions,
as well as by Finnish, Romanian,
Slovakian and Hungarian troops.
There was even a division
of Spanish fascists.
4 million men, along
with 600,000 trucks,
launched Hitler's invasion
of the Soviet Union,
Operation Barbarossa.
Along with 4,000 tanks,
7,000 artillery pieces...
..and 3,000 airplanes.
In just a few minutes,
1,500 Soviet aircraft
were destroyed on the ground.
In the first few hours,
400 more Russian planes
were shot down by the Germans.
Taken by surprise and
entirely overpowered,
the Soviet air force was nearly
wiped out on the first day.
The German offensive
was unleashed
across an 1800-mile front, and
in three different directions.
In the North was the ideological target
- Leningrad, Lenin's city,
the cradle of the Russian
Revolution - whose
name has since been
restored to St Petersburg.
In the centre was the political target
- Moscow, Stalin's capital.
In the south was the economic target
- Kiev and the Ukraine.
Pravda, the Communist
Party's official newspaper,
reported on the
fascist aggression.
But Stalin had gone into hiding,
dismayed by the catastrophic news
that was coming in
from the border.
Some said he had a breakdown.
The German advance was swift.
Lieutenant von Kageneck -
It's an amazing sight!
Our entire regiment of
Panzers is moving out!
Our tanks, tall and proud like boats,
sail over a yellow sea of ripe wheat.
It seemed that nothing
could stop the Germans.
Their mission had been
hammered into them -
you are going to save the
West from the Asiatic hordes.
This is a modern crusade against the
power of darkness, Judeo-Bolshevism.
In the northern Baltic States,
the Germans were given
a triumphant welcome.
They were hailed as liberators.
After Stalin's reign of terror,
anything was better than
the ruthless Soviet secret
police responsible for
political repression.
Before they fled,
they executed all the Baltic
anti-communists in the prisons.
Local anti-Semites accused the Jews of
being in collusion with the communists.
They rounded up the Jews and
made them carry off the corpses.
Across the Baltic States, people started
organising pogroms against Jews,
which the Germans encouraged with
instructions not to leave any traces.
Burning the bodies was one way
of destroying the evidence.
On the central front,
General Guderian,
the tank strategist and architect of the
Blitzkrieg, was held up by the Stalin Line,
a series of fortifications that the
German infantry was forced to assault.
Guderian broke through and
continued his advance.
But something unexpected began to slow
down his fast-moving motorised units,
as described by von Kageneck.
We advance in our armoured
cars and the dust envelops us.
We're in Russia!
Where roads and asphalt don't exist!
It's awful.
This sticky yellow or red
dust gets into everything -
into your eyes, your
nose, your mouth.
Under these conditions, soldiers
still marched 30 miles a day.
They had been marching since
the 1st of September 1939.
They had marched all the way
to Warsaw, to Oslo, to Paris.
But now they were beginning to
realise just how vast Russia was.
Hundreds and hundreds of miles went
by without a single village in sight.
It became harder and harder for the supply,
fuel and ammunition trucks to keep up.
But there was something else the
German soldiers had not expected.
Despite massive losses, the Russians
were putting up a good defence.
A new type of Russian tank
appeared on the scene,
the T-34, a 30-ton monster that was
equipped with a formidable cannon.
And wide tracks that meant
it could go anywhere.
It was not as sophisticated
as the German tanks.
To change gears,
the Soviet tank driver had to hit
the gear lever with a mallet.
But the T-34 rarely broke down.
The Germans were taken aback.
They couldn't understand how these
sub-humans, as they thought of the Russians,
had been able to manufacture
such a brilliant tank.
The shells of their anti-tank guns
ricocheted off the T-34's armour plating.
The only weapon powerful
enough to neutralise it
was the German 88mm.
Overall, the Germans were better armed,
and their army was much stronger.
But these Ivans, as they
called the Russians,
fought tooth and nail
until the very end.
Von Kageneck again -
The smell of corpses baked by
the sun, covered with flies.
A sickly sweet odour that
clings to the nostrils
and gets under your skin,
just like the dust.
The Russians had suffered heavy losses,
but German casualties were also rising.
Still, the Germans continued to make
progress toward their three goals,
Leningrad, Moscow and Kiev, by
capturing entire Soviet armies.
Hitler's orders were to immediately
execute all political commissars,
members of the Communist Party whose
job was to oversee the officers
and keep an eye on the soldiers
in each military unit.
Guderian refused to carry
out such a criminal order.
However, other generals
were more willing.
The commander of the
Fourth Panzer Army group,
General Hoepner
declared menacingly -
This war must be led with
unprecedented brutality.
There is to be no mercy
for the Bolsheviks.
Throughout the summer of 1941
the Russians were engaged in a
desperate struggle with
the German invaders,
sometimes with only one
rifle for every ten men.
They were forced to retreat along
the entire 1,800 mile front.
For Stalin, things were
looking very black.
He completely disappeared from
public view for over a week.
Everyone wanted to
know where he was
and expected him to provide
leadership at this critical time.
In July, Stalin finally addressed
the Russian people again.
Stalin spoke words he had
never used in public before.
He called the Russians, "My
brothers and my sisters."
He told them the truth.
!We're under attack
by Hitler's Germany.
"The enemy is cruel and implacable. A
grave danger hangs over our country."
In the darkest hour,
he dared to ask...
"Is it true that German fascist
troops are invincible?
"Napoleon's army was considered
invincible, but it was beaten."
Stalin ordered the
war factories,
along with their machinery
and their workers,
to relocate to the east
to the Ural Mountains.
And he gave farmers and
peasants a clear order - leave.
Leave your isba, your
house, destroy everything.
Leave behind nothing
that can be of any use
to the fascist
Hitlerite aggressor.
This was the beginning of
Stalin's scorched earth policy.
The German officers had
not forgotten the story
of Napoleon's
invasion of Russia.
In 1812 the Russians had
starved Napoleon's Grand Army
by burning their towns and fields,
and then massacred the French
at the Battle of Berezina.
In early July 1941 the
Germans also reached
the Berezina River on
the central front.
But this time they kept going.
But Soviet resistance was
gradually growing stronger.
On the other side of the river
there was an unpleasant
surprise for the Germans.
The Russians had designed
a new kind of artillery.
A rocket launcher called a
Katyusha after a patriotic song.
It proved to be
terrifying weapon.
But nothing could stop
the German advance.
By mid-July the invaders
had reached Smolensk,
the last big city before Moscow.
The Battle for Smolensk
lasted three weeks.
The Russians fought with
immense determination,
despite the calls for surrender
coming over giant loudspeakers.
Very few were taken prisoner.
The survivors preferred to go
into hiding in the deep forests
and became partisans.
The soldiers trained the many
peasants and farmers who joined them.
They hunted down traitors...
..and disrupted the enemy
communication lines.
Reprisals were brutal.
The Fuhrer ordered, "Immediately
liquidate all people suspected
"of harbouring even the
smallest amount of hostility."
Hitler decided to make
a visit to the front.
With him went the Wehrmacht
commander-in-chief,
the servile Field
Marshal Keitel.
Operation Barbarossa
was slowing down.
The generals believed
that Hitler's strategy
of the three-pronged
attack was to blame.
Field Marshal Von Bock,
commander of Army Group Centre,
argued that all of the forces
should be focused on Moscow.
Hitler did not like generals
who dared to contradict him.
General Guderian was there, too.
He added, "We're only 300
miles from Moscow now."
"You understand nothing,"
said the Furher.
"You know nothing of
wartime economics.
"First we need the wheat from the
Ukraine so that they don't starve us
"as they did in the
previous war."
He concluded, "Moscow is
nothing but a symbol.
"We'll take care of it later."
He ordered Guderian to
swing south towards Kiev
in order to mop up the Russian
armies still operating in pockets
to the rear of the
advancing Wehrmacht.
It proved to be the biggest
encirclement of all time.
The Germans captured 600,000 Russian
soldiers in one fell swoop.
In September, SS Chief Heinrich
Himmler visited this front.
No provisions had been made to
feed these Russian prisoners.
With supreme indifference,
Himmler dismissed the prisoners
as Untermensch - as sub-humans.
He wasn't worried if they
all starved to death.
Lt Von Kageneck wrote...
We lived quite well
in the Ukraine.
We had everything we needed -
eggs, butter, fruit, milk, wine,
an excellent red wine from the
area around the Black Sea.
The Ukrainians would come up to
us, smiling, filled with joy.
The women would bring
us bread and honey.
They saw us as their liberators.
The Ukrainians had lots of
reasons to hate the Russians.
Many were hostile to Stalin
who, in the early 30s,
had organised
agricultural reforms
in which 3 million Ukrainians
died of starvation.
Many Ukrainians who
were anti-Semitic
were encouraged by the Nazis
to incriminate the Jews
and carry out pogroms,
such as here in Zolochiv,
while German soldiers looked on.
In all, many Ukrainians thought they
were better off with the Nazis.
But Germany did nothing to
try to win further support.
Marshal Goering, the second
highest-ranking figure in the Reich,
said of the Ukraine...
We want nouseless
mouths to feed.
Those who can work, will work for
the Reich. The rest will die.
Those who work will give
everything they have
until they themselves die.
Goering and Joshua Rosenberg, who was
behind much of Nazi racist thinking,
visited the region to work out
how to enslave the Ukraine
and to make plans for the systematic
annihilation of the Jews.
Himmler and Heydrich set up
execution commando squads
called Einsatzgruppen.
They were composed of SS members,
policemen and Wehrmacht soldiers.
Their task was to round
up groups of Jews.
The SS took the
Jews into the woods
and gave them shovels so they
could dig their own graves.
But the SS decided that
this process was too slow.
So they ordered long
common graves to be dug
and made their victims line up on top
of the last group of dead bodies.
But even this method of
killing took too long.
The SS selected a ravine at a
place called Babi Yar, near Kiev.
33,771 Jews were executed
in just two days.
Men, women and children.
Amid this terrible carnage, and in
hundreds of sites along the front,
the executioners took
pictures of their victims
as souvenirs for their
families back in Germany.
This premeditated, cold-blooded
murder of a million Jews
came to be known as the
Holocaust by bullets.
But Himmler was not pleased.
He attended one of the
Einsatzgruppen's executions
and was spattered with blood.
It made him feel sick. He told the
SS to use more humane methods.
This lead to the use of gas vans
with exhaust pipes hooked up
to special compartments,
and a year later...
to the gas chambers.
In the north of Russia,
the Germans advanced
hundreds of miles and arrived
outside the city of Leningrad.
The long siege of
the city began.
The Germans had a plan
to deal with Leningrad.
Instead of fighting
street by street,
they let the artillery
do its work.
Surrounded, they knew that the city's
inhabitants would slowly starve to death.
The famous Leningrad
Library was destroyed.
The zoo was devastated.
Food rations soon fell below
the minimum necessary.
But the worst was still to come
with the arrival of winter.
Guderian, who had been sent on the
detour south, finally received
the order from Hitler to rejoin
the other armies further north
and to proceed towards Moscow.
The Russians were fighting
along an enormous front,
from Leningrad to Odessa.
And this time the thrust towards
Moscow seemed unstoppable.
The Germans took another
700,000 prisoners.
General Jodl, chief of staff
of the Wehrmacht, announced,
"We have won the war."
In the south, Lieutenant
von Kageneck wrote:
We suddenly had to deal with
a most frightful adversary -
the autumn rain and mud which
the Russians call Rasputiza.
Endless mud, so
gluey and sticky,
that it sucks and holds
onto everything.
It won't let go of anything,
whether it be a tank, a truck,
a horse or a man.
It makes movement impossible.
We do four to five miles
a day, instead of 30.
Putting one foot in front of the
other requires superhuman effort.
The Panzers, the pride
of the Wehrmacht,
are brought to a standstill.
Hitler wrote to his troops,
"Soldiers on the Eastern front!
Comrades!
"Today begins the last
great decisive battle,
"the battle for Moscow!"
And in October, the German army
started moving again towards Moscow
because the frost had come
and hardened the ground.
The world was
holding its breath.
Would Hitler defeat Stalin?
In November 1941, temperatures
plummeted to minus40 degrees Celsius.
The Wehrmacht had been trained
to conduct a Blitzkrieg,
a lightning war.
It was supposed to bring Russia
to its knees within four months.
It was not equipped
for a harsh winter.
Guderian wrote in his memoirs:
It was a sight to see
those half-starved,
insufficiently clothed men
fight over a poor shelter.
They fought over even
the tiniest village.
Losing a village, losing even a
single isba, could mean death.
The men started to die
of cold and dysentery.
Diarrhoea made their
lives a misery.
Dr Haape, the Wehrmachtphysician,
had to warn them:
You have to choose. If you pull down
your trousers, you'll freeze to death.
You must take apart
the seam in the back
so you won't have
to pull them down.
They envied their
fellow soldiers
in the Afrika Korps who, at that
verymoment, in the North African desert,
were able to fry
eggs on their tanks.
Their theme became the
popular song Lili Marleen.
♪ Lili Marleen
♪ Wie Einst Lili Marleen. ♪
But the war in the desert was
also getting bogged down -
in the sand.
Petrol and food supplies
were drying up.
Rommel had to order
a temporary halt.
But, ever resourceful, Rommel
began to plan another offensive
that would bring new sacrifices
for his men in the Afrika Korps.
Back on the road to Moscow,
the Germans were no longer able to
wash or to change their clothes.
Like their enemies, they were
driven crazy by lice and parasites
that brought scabies and typhus.
Napoleon's Grand Army had lost
a third of its men to typhus.
In spite of it all, the
Wehrmacht pushed on.
They were now only 20
miles from Moscow.
The German vanguard reached
the outskirts of Moscow
and the end of the bus route that
went straight to Red Square.
With German troops so near,
Stalin still ordered the parades
commemorating the anniversary of the
Revolution to be held as usual.
To galvanise his troops, Stalin
made a speech that invoked names
that had been written out of
Russian history by the Soviets,
the great soldiers from
the time of the Tsars.
"Be worthy of your glorious ancestors
- Dmitry Donskoy,
"who defeated the Tatars.
Alexander Nevsky,
"who defeated the Teutons. Suvorov,
the Turks. And Kutuzov, Napoleon!"
Stalin had organized
the defence of Moscow
with one of his most brilliant
generals, a tank specialist
considered to be the Russian
equivalent of Guderian,
45-year-old General
Georgy Zhukov.
Luck was on Zhukov's side.
A Soviet spy had discovered
that Japan, although Hitler's ally,
had decided not to attack Russia
because its main enemy
was the United States.
This enabled Zhukov to withdraw
troops from the Far East.
He brought over several
divisions from Siberia.
The Siberian troops were
well trained and well equipped to
deal with harsh winter conditions.
They had all that was needed
to fight in the snow.
They even brought their skis
and their reindeer with them.
Now it was time to turn the
tables on the German invaders.
Zhukov wanted to trap the
Wehrmacht in a pincer movement.
On the 5th of December, he
launched his counter attack.
50,000 Germans were
killed or went missing.
57,000 were taken prisoner.
They were sent off to Siberia.
Their struggle with the
cold was far from over.
Only one out of ten of them
would ever return home.
Lieutenant von Kageneck was
severely wounded and evacuated
back to Germany. He wrote:
"Faith disappears, doubt
becomes obsessive.
"Death becomes your best
friend, man's only friend,
"because it will deliver
you from your suffering."
The suffering of the Russians
was not over either.
Their country had been ravaged.
But Moscow had been saved,
although millions had been killed or taken
prisoner, and the danger was still there.
The Wehrmacht were
pushed back 120 miles.
Hitler ordered his army to defend
this new line at all costs.
He dismissed 35 generals,
including Guderian,
and took personal charge
of the Wehrmacht.
He would now personally take on
the task of reviving his army,
re-equipping his troops
and plotting his revenge.
The Wehrmacht would remain
firmly planted in Russia.
Hitler returned to his dogs
back in his Bavarian retreat.
In his opinion, the defeat
before Moscow was the fault
of his generals and his diplomats.
After all they were the ones
who had claimed that France and
Britainwouldn't go to war over Poland.
And he blamed the Abwehr, the
German intelligence service,
that misinformed him about the
state of the Russian army.
For the children
of the Nazi elite,
as for many Germans, life in
Germany was still carefree.
The massive bombings of German
cities had not yet begun
and those struggling to survive
in Moscow were far away.
Two days after Hitler's first
major defeat, his ally Japan,
launched a surprise attack on the
United States at Pearl Harbor,
the base of the
US Pacific Fleet.
And with this Japanese assault,
the war would become a world war.
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd
defeat of France,
Paris filled up
with Nazi soldiers.
Every day, at exactly 1pm,
the German Army paraded through
Paris - to show who was in charge.
The Germans now occupied the most
of the capital cities of Europe -
Prague and Warsaw,
Brussels, Luxembourg,
The Hague, Copenhagen and Oslo.
But not London... yet.
This series is the epic
story of World War Two,
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.
During the winter of
1940 Britain's cities
were devastated by German bombs.
But the country stood
firm around Churchill.
And American aid was sent
in by President Roosevelt.
Roosevelt was re-elected for
a third term as President
of the United States.
Though American opinion remained
opposed to joining the war,
he declared: We must become the
great arsenal of democracy.
But only some of the supplies
America sent to
Britain got through.
Every British ship at sea
was in great danger.
The Atlantic Ocean was crawling with
German submarines, the U-boats.
Through their periscopes, the U-boat
captains sought out British vessels.
Churchill was desperately worried.
He knew that if the supply convoys
failed to get through Britain
would be on its knees.
As an island nation, Britain was
reliant upon supplies from overseas.
The German U-boats now had
the French Atlantic
harbours at their disposal.
Operating in deadly groups,
using torpedoes and cannons,
these wolf packs succeeded
in sinking 4 million tons of
British shipping in 1941 alone.
Here, German submariners
toss loaves of bread
to a shipwrecked crew who have
almost no chance of surviving.
They would die of
thirst, of hunger,
of cold or by choking on oil.
Hitler was delighted
with the success of
hissubmarines, but America's huge
rearmament programme worried him.
He told his secretary,
Martin Bormann:
"In one year, the United States
will be ready to go to war.
"If we are to face them, we
need more raw 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 drew up a massive invasion
plan to invade the Soviet Union
called Operation Barbarossa, named
after the triumphant German Emperor.
The Wehrmacht started to
move its troops east.
Lieutenant von Kageneck
was one of the many thousands of
young officers who left for Poland.
He saw the debris from
the battles of 1939
piled up alongside the railway.
Polish prisoners and Jews had
been put to work on a massive
construction project.
Hitler wanted to build a
new autobahn, or motorway,
right across Poland to move his army
over to the new border with Russia.
This was where the 9th Panzer
Division was installed,
along with von Kageneck's regiment.
He wrote:
"Next to us is an SS unit.
"The commander asks us, 'Do you
want to see a Jew?' He makes a sign
"and a soldier brings
over a little man.
"'How many people have you stolen
from today?' The man doesn't reply.
"'Beat him 10 times with a
stick!' We were appalled.
"So this is our occupation of Poland?
We had heard vague stories of
"cruelty, but it was impossible
to know what was really going on.
"This country had become
the country of silence.
"We didn't know that this was
the beginning of the genocide
"to which we would lend
ourhands and our courage.
The 9th Panzer Division was ready to
attack, but the order didn't come.
So they went round
in circles, waiting.
At the last minute,
Hitler deferred his plans
for an offensive in the East.
He had to help out
his ally Mussolini
who had tried to fight his own
separate war and got into trouble.
The Duce's troops had been routed
by the British in North Africa.
125,000 Italian prisoners had
been taken by the British army.
To rescue Mussolini from disaster,
Hitler dispatched one of his best
generals to Libya, Erwin Rommel,
along with an armoured division.
In February 1941, this small
army of German soldiers known as
the Afrika Korps arrived
in North Africa.
They had no idea what
lay in store for them.
In Germany, Rommel was already
a big hero: he was the man
whohad taken Cambrai, Rouen and
Cherbourg in May and June of 1940.
And he was a true Nazi, a devoted
supporter who had served Hitler
with zeal and efficiency
from the very beginning.
Rommel believed in tanks, in
blitzkrieg, or lightning war.
On the first evening
after their arrival,
he ordered the Afrika Korps
to pursue the British
Army, with rapid success.
These Australian and South
African prisoners had come
to fight alongside the British.
Now they would spend
the rest of the war
in a German
prisoner-of-war camp.
Rommel soon began to
make a name for himself.
The British circulated his
picture with the caption:
"This man is dangerous."
Hitler attacked Greece,
a country that
Mussolini had already
tried to take.
After invading Yugoslavia, he dropped
his paratroopers over Crete.
Hitler had at last secured
his southern flank
for the invasion of Russia, but
he had lost precious time.
Operation Barbarossa had been
delayed by several weeks.
First of May 1941.
A great military parade was traditionally
held in Moscow's Red Square
every year to celebrate
International Labour Day.
But this year, the
parade was special.
Stalin wanted to make a big
impression on the Germans.
Although he had been
receiving information from
his spies warning that
an attack was imminent,
he found it impossible to believe
that Hitler would dare to break
the German-Soviet
Non-Aggression Pact so soon.
And senior German officers
were attending this parade.
Marshal Timoshenko, the People's
Commissar and Stalin's Defence Minister,
appeared to salute them
with great respect.
The German army later argued that
this display of military force
was proof that Stalin planned
to strike them first.
Churchill passed on intelligence reports
to Stalin that Hitler was about to invade.
But Stalin ignored them.
Just as he ignored a message sent
by a Soviet spy based in Tokyo.
The document, dated 30 May 1941,
warned of an imminent German attack.
Stalin actually continued to
send raw materials to the Reich.
Since the signing of the
German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact,
he had exported thousands of tons of
oil, chrome and nickel to Germany -
all of which helped Hitler's
armies conquer Western Europe.
A trainload was sent off on the
night of the 21st of June 1941.
Carrying 1000 tons of wheat,
this train crossed over
the border at midnight.
On that same morning, at 3am,
without officially declaring war,
the first Wehrmacht sappers crept
forward into Russian territory.
They were followed by
153 German divisions,
as well as by Finnish, Romanian,
Slovakian and Hungarian troops.
There was even a division
of Spanish fascists.
4 million men, along
with 600,000 trucks,
launched Hitler's invasion
of the Soviet Union,
Operation Barbarossa.
Along with 4,000 tanks,
7,000 artillery pieces...
..and 3,000 airplanes.
In just a few minutes,
1,500 Soviet aircraft
were destroyed on the ground.
In the first few hours,
400 more Russian planes
were shot down by the Germans.
Taken by surprise and
entirely overpowered,
the Soviet air force was nearly
wiped out on the first day.
The German offensive
was unleashed
across an 1800-mile front, and
in three different directions.
In the North was the ideological target
- Leningrad, Lenin's city,
the cradle of the Russian
Revolution - whose
name has since been
restored to St Petersburg.
In the centre was the political target
- Moscow, Stalin's capital.
In the south was the economic target
- Kiev and the Ukraine.
Pravda, the Communist
Party's official newspaper,
reported on the
fascist aggression.
But Stalin had gone into hiding,
dismayed by the catastrophic news
that was coming in
from the border.
Some said he had a breakdown.
The German advance was swift.
Lieutenant von Kageneck -
It's an amazing sight!
Our entire regiment of
Panzers is moving out!
Our tanks, tall and proud like boats,
sail over a yellow sea of ripe wheat.
It seemed that nothing
could stop the Germans.
Their mission had been
hammered into them -
you are going to save the
West from the Asiatic hordes.
This is a modern crusade against the
power of darkness, Judeo-Bolshevism.
In the northern Baltic States,
the Germans were given
a triumphant welcome.
They were hailed as liberators.
After Stalin's reign of terror,
anything was better than
the ruthless Soviet secret
police responsible for
political repression.
Before they fled,
they executed all the Baltic
anti-communists in the prisons.
Local anti-Semites accused the Jews of
being in collusion with the communists.
They rounded up the Jews and
made them carry off the corpses.
Across the Baltic States, people started
organising pogroms against Jews,
which the Germans encouraged with
instructions not to leave any traces.
Burning the bodies was one way
of destroying the evidence.
On the central front,
General Guderian,
the tank strategist and architect of the
Blitzkrieg, was held up by the Stalin Line,
a series of fortifications that the
German infantry was forced to assault.
Guderian broke through and
continued his advance.
But something unexpected began to slow
down his fast-moving motorised units,
as described by von Kageneck.
We advance in our armoured
cars and the dust envelops us.
We're in Russia!
Where roads and asphalt don't exist!
It's awful.
This sticky yellow or red
dust gets into everything -
into your eyes, your
nose, your mouth.
Under these conditions, soldiers
still marched 30 miles a day.
They had been marching since
the 1st of September 1939.
They had marched all the way
to Warsaw, to Oslo, to Paris.
But now they were beginning to
realise just how vast Russia was.
Hundreds and hundreds of miles went
by without a single village in sight.
It became harder and harder for the supply,
fuel and ammunition trucks to keep up.
But there was something else the
German soldiers had not expected.
Despite massive losses, the Russians
were putting up a good defence.
A new type of Russian tank
appeared on the scene,
the T-34, a 30-ton monster that was
equipped with a formidable cannon.
And wide tracks that meant
it could go anywhere.
It was not as sophisticated
as the German tanks.
To change gears,
the Soviet tank driver had to hit
the gear lever with a mallet.
But the T-34 rarely broke down.
The Germans were taken aback.
They couldn't understand how these
sub-humans, as they thought of the Russians,
had been able to manufacture
such a brilliant tank.
The shells of their anti-tank guns
ricocheted off the T-34's armour plating.
The only weapon powerful
enough to neutralise it
was the German 88mm.
Overall, the Germans were better armed,
and their army was much stronger.
But these Ivans, as they
called the Russians,
fought tooth and nail
until the very end.
Von Kageneck again -
The smell of corpses baked by
the sun, covered with flies.
A sickly sweet odour that
clings to the nostrils
and gets under your skin,
just like the dust.
The Russians had suffered heavy losses,
but German casualties were also rising.
Still, the Germans continued to make
progress toward their three goals,
Leningrad, Moscow and Kiev, by
capturing entire Soviet armies.
Hitler's orders were to immediately
execute all political commissars,
members of the Communist Party whose
job was to oversee the officers
and keep an eye on the soldiers
in each military unit.
Guderian refused to carry
out such a criminal order.
However, other generals
were more willing.
The commander of the
Fourth Panzer Army group,
General Hoepner
declared menacingly -
This war must be led with
unprecedented brutality.
There is to be no mercy
for the Bolsheviks.
Throughout the summer of 1941
the Russians were engaged in a
desperate struggle with
the German invaders,
sometimes with only one
rifle for every ten men.
They were forced to retreat along
the entire 1,800 mile front.
For Stalin, things were
looking very black.
He completely disappeared from
public view for over a week.
Everyone wanted to
know where he was
and expected him to provide
leadership at this critical time.
In July, Stalin finally addressed
the Russian people again.
Stalin spoke words he had
never used in public before.
He called the Russians, "My
brothers and my sisters."
He told them the truth.
!We're under attack
by Hitler's Germany.
"The enemy is cruel and implacable. A
grave danger hangs over our country."
In the darkest hour,
he dared to ask...
"Is it true that German fascist
troops are invincible?
"Napoleon's army was considered
invincible, but it was beaten."
Stalin ordered the
war factories,
along with their machinery
and their workers,
to relocate to the east
to the Ural Mountains.
And he gave farmers and
peasants a clear order - leave.
Leave your isba, your
house, destroy everything.
Leave behind nothing
that can be of any use
to the fascist
Hitlerite aggressor.
This was the beginning of
Stalin's scorched earth policy.
The German officers had
not forgotten the story
of Napoleon's
invasion of Russia.
In 1812 the Russians had
starved Napoleon's Grand Army
by burning their towns and fields,
and then massacred the French
at the Battle of Berezina.
In early July 1941 the
Germans also reached
the Berezina River on
the central front.
But this time they kept going.
But Soviet resistance was
gradually growing stronger.
On the other side of the river
there was an unpleasant
surprise for the Germans.
The Russians had designed
a new kind of artillery.
A rocket launcher called a
Katyusha after a patriotic song.
It proved to be
terrifying weapon.
But nothing could stop
the German advance.
By mid-July the invaders
had reached Smolensk,
the last big city before Moscow.
The Battle for Smolensk
lasted three weeks.
The Russians fought with
immense determination,
despite the calls for surrender
coming over giant loudspeakers.
Very few were taken prisoner.
The survivors preferred to go
into hiding in the deep forests
and became partisans.
The soldiers trained the many
peasants and farmers who joined them.
They hunted down traitors...
..and disrupted the enemy
communication lines.
Reprisals were brutal.
The Fuhrer ordered, "Immediately
liquidate all people suspected
"of harbouring even the
smallest amount of hostility."
Hitler decided to make
a visit to the front.
With him went the Wehrmacht
commander-in-chief,
the servile Field
Marshal Keitel.
Operation Barbarossa
was slowing down.
The generals believed
that Hitler's strategy
of the three-pronged
attack was to blame.
Field Marshal Von Bock,
commander of Army Group Centre,
argued that all of the forces
should be focused on Moscow.
Hitler did not like generals
who dared to contradict him.
General Guderian was there, too.
He added, "We're only 300
miles from Moscow now."
"You understand nothing,"
said the Furher.
"You know nothing of
wartime economics.
"First we need the wheat from the
Ukraine so that they don't starve us
"as they did in the
previous war."
He concluded, "Moscow is
nothing but a symbol.
"We'll take care of it later."
He ordered Guderian to
swing south towards Kiev
in order to mop up the Russian
armies still operating in pockets
to the rear of the
advancing Wehrmacht.
It proved to be the biggest
encirclement of all time.
The Germans captured 600,000 Russian
soldiers in one fell swoop.
In September, SS Chief Heinrich
Himmler visited this front.
No provisions had been made to
feed these Russian prisoners.
With supreme indifference,
Himmler dismissed the prisoners
as Untermensch - as sub-humans.
He wasn't worried if they
all starved to death.
Lt Von Kageneck wrote...
We lived quite well
in the Ukraine.
We had everything we needed -
eggs, butter, fruit, milk, wine,
an excellent red wine from the
area around the Black Sea.
The Ukrainians would come up to
us, smiling, filled with joy.
The women would bring
us bread and honey.
They saw us as their liberators.
The Ukrainians had lots of
reasons to hate the Russians.
Many were hostile to Stalin
who, in the early 30s,
had organised
agricultural reforms
in which 3 million Ukrainians
died of starvation.
Many Ukrainians who
were anti-Semitic
were encouraged by the Nazis
to incriminate the Jews
and carry out pogroms,
such as here in Zolochiv,
while German soldiers looked on.
In all, many Ukrainians thought they
were better off with the Nazis.
But Germany did nothing to
try to win further support.
Marshal Goering, the second
highest-ranking figure in the Reich,
said of the Ukraine...
We want nouseless
mouths to feed.
Those who can work, will work for
the Reich. The rest will die.
Those who work will give
everything they have
until they themselves die.
Goering and Joshua Rosenberg, who was
behind much of Nazi racist thinking,
visited the region to work out
how to enslave the Ukraine
and to make plans for the systematic
annihilation of the Jews.
Himmler and Heydrich set up
execution commando squads
called Einsatzgruppen.
They were composed of SS members,
policemen and Wehrmacht soldiers.
Their task was to round
up groups of Jews.
The SS took the
Jews into the woods
and gave them shovels so they
could dig their own graves.
But the SS decided that
this process was too slow.
So they ordered long
common graves to be dug
and made their victims line up on top
of the last group of dead bodies.
But even this method of
killing took too long.
The SS selected a ravine at a
place called Babi Yar, near Kiev.
33,771 Jews were executed
in just two days.
Men, women and children.
Amid this terrible carnage, and in
hundreds of sites along the front,
the executioners took
pictures of their victims
as souvenirs for their
families back in Germany.
This premeditated, cold-blooded
murder of a million Jews
came to be known as the
Holocaust by bullets.
But Himmler was not pleased.
He attended one of the
Einsatzgruppen's executions
and was spattered with blood.
It made him feel sick. He told the
SS to use more humane methods.
This lead to the use of gas vans
with exhaust pipes hooked up
to special compartments,
and a year later...
to the gas chambers.
In the north of Russia,
the Germans advanced
hundreds of miles and arrived
outside the city of Leningrad.
The long siege of
the city began.
The Germans had a plan
to deal with Leningrad.
Instead of fighting
street by street,
they let the artillery
do its work.
Surrounded, they knew that the city's
inhabitants would slowly starve to death.
The famous Leningrad
Library was destroyed.
The zoo was devastated.
Food rations soon fell below
the minimum necessary.
But the worst was still to come
with the arrival of winter.
Guderian, who had been sent on the
detour south, finally received
the order from Hitler to rejoin
the other armies further north
and to proceed towards Moscow.
The Russians were fighting
along an enormous front,
from Leningrad to Odessa.
And this time the thrust towards
Moscow seemed unstoppable.
The Germans took another
700,000 prisoners.
General Jodl, chief of staff
of the Wehrmacht, announced,
"We have won the war."
In the south, Lieutenant
von Kageneck wrote:
We suddenly had to deal with
a most frightful adversary -
the autumn rain and mud which
the Russians call Rasputiza.
Endless mud, so
gluey and sticky,
that it sucks and holds
onto everything.
It won't let go of anything,
whether it be a tank, a truck,
a horse or a man.
It makes movement impossible.
We do four to five miles
a day, instead of 30.
Putting one foot in front of the
other requires superhuman effort.
The Panzers, the pride
of the Wehrmacht,
are brought to a standstill.
Hitler wrote to his troops,
"Soldiers on the Eastern front!
Comrades!
"Today begins the last
great decisive battle,
"the battle for Moscow!"
And in October, the German army
started moving again towards Moscow
because the frost had come
and hardened the ground.
The world was
holding its breath.
Would Hitler defeat Stalin?
In November 1941, temperatures
plummeted to minus40 degrees Celsius.
The Wehrmacht had been trained
to conduct a Blitzkrieg,
a lightning war.
It was supposed to bring Russia
to its knees within four months.
It was not equipped
for a harsh winter.
Guderian wrote in his memoirs:
It was a sight to see
those half-starved,
insufficiently clothed men
fight over a poor shelter.
They fought over even
the tiniest village.
Losing a village, losing even a
single isba, could mean death.
The men started to die
of cold and dysentery.
Diarrhoea made their
lives a misery.
Dr Haape, the Wehrmachtphysician,
had to warn them:
You have to choose. If you pull down
your trousers, you'll freeze to death.
You must take apart
the seam in the back
so you won't have
to pull them down.
They envied their
fellow soldiers
in the Afrika Korps who, at that
verymoment, in the North African desert,
were able to fry
eggs on their tanks.
Their theme became the
popular song Lili Marleen.
♪ Lili Marleen
♪ Wie Einst Lili Marleen. ♪
But the war in the desert was
also getting bogged down -
in the sand.
Petrol and food supplies
were drying up.
Rommel had to order
a temporary halt.
But, ever resourceful, Rommel
began to plan another offensive
that would bring new sacrifices
for his men in the Afrika Korps.
Back on the road to Moscow,
the Germans were no longer able to
wash or to change their clothes.
Like their enemies, they were
driven crazy by lice and parasites
that brought scabies and typhus.
Napoleon's Grand Army had lost
a third of its men to typhus.
In spite of it all, the
Wehrmacht pushed on.
They were now only 20
miles from Moscow.
The German vanguard reached
the outskirts of Moscow
and the end of the bus route that
went straight to Red Square.
With German troops so near,
Stalin still ordered the parades
commemorating the anniversary of the
Revolution to be held as usual.
To galvanise his troops, Stalin
made a speech that invoked names
that had been written out of
Russian history by the Soviets,
the great soldiers from
the time of the Tsars.
"Be worthy of your glorious ancestors
- Dmitry Donskoy,
"who defeated the Tatars.
Alexander Nevsky,
"who defeated the Teutons. Suvorov,
the Turks. And Kutuzov, Napoleon!"
Stalin had organized
the defence of Moscow
with one of his most brilliant
generals, a tank specialist
considered to be the Russian
equivalent of Guderian,
45-year-old General
Georgy Zhukov.
Luck was on Zhukov's side.
A Soviet spy had discovered
that Japan, although Hitler's ally,
had decided not to attack Russia
because its main enemy
was the United States.
This enabled Zhukov to withdraw
troops from the Far East.
He brought over several
divisions from Siberia.
The Siberian troops were
well trained and well equipped to
deal with harsh winter conditions.
They had all that was needed
to fight in the snow.
They even brought their skis
and their reindeer with them.
Now it was time to turn the
tables on the German invaders.
Zhukov wanted to trap the
Wehrmacht in a pincer movement.
On the 5th of December, he
launched his counter attack.
50,000 Germans were
killed or went missing.
57,000 were taken prisoner.
They were sent off to Siberia.
Their struggle with the
cold was far from over.
Only one out of ten of them
would ever return home.
Lieutenant von Kageneck was
severely wounded and evacuated
back to Germany. He wrote:
"Faith disappears, doubt
becomes obsessive.
"Death becomes your best
friend, man's only friend,
"because it will deliver
you from your suffering."
The suffering of the Russians
was not over either.
Their country had been ravaged.
But Moscow had been saved,
although millions had been killed or taken
prisoner, and the danger was still there.
The Wehrmacht were
pushed back 120 miles.
Hitler ordered his army to defend
this new line at all costs.
He dismissed 35 generals,
including Guderian,
and took personal charge
of the Wehrmacht.
He would now personally take on
the task of reviving his army,
re-equipping his troops
and plotting his revenge.
The Wehrmacht would remain
firmly planted in Russia.
Hitler returned to his dogs
back in his Bavarian retreat.
In his opinion, the defeat
before Moscow was the fault
of his generals and his diplomats.
After all they were the ones
who had claimed that France and
Britainwouldn't go to war over Poland.
And he blamed the Abwehr, the
German intelligence service,
that misinformed him about the
state of the Russian army.
For the children
of the Nazi elite,
as for many Germans, life in
Germany was still carefree.
The massive bombings of German
cities had not yet begun
and those struggling to survive
in Moscow were far away.
Two days after Hitler's first
major defeat, his ally Japan,
launched a surprise attack on the
United States at Pearl Harbor,
the base of the
US Pacific Fleet.
And with this Japanese assault,
the war would become a world war.
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd