The World at War (1973–1974): Season 1, Episode 25 - Reckoning: 1945... and After - full transcript

The bombing has stopped.
The fires are out.

Europe lies in ruin.

The dead are gone forever.

The living carry on.

Everywhere the same:

no gas, no water,
no telephones, no trams.

Time to count the cost.

Time to start again.

Springtime 1945.

The end of the war in Central Europe.

The end of the thousand-year Reich.



Untidy. Messy.

A time without pity.

A time of brutality,

rape.

Revenge.

The Germans come back from the eastern
lands they'd tried to conquer,

where some had lived for generations.

They'd been bad masters.

Now they pay the price.

At least they are alive.

The last hours of the Wehrmacht,
an army in dissolution.

It has made war on the world.

Now it saves what it can.

The mood of the German troops
who were surrendering was one of relief.



They were happy, for the most part,
to surrender.

They were interested in
getting to the American lines,

in preference to surrendering
to the advancing Russian line.

A defeated army - but even
at the end, not always a broken one.

The habits of a lifetime die hard.

But at last, the blood-letting
is nearly over.

You had a European civil war
that began in 1914.

There was a long armistice in that war.

It finally comes to an end in 1945.
In the process of coming to the end,

what happens is that
sweeping into Europe from the outside

are the Russians and the Americans.

And they meet at Torgau
on the Elbe River in May of 1945 -

with the result that no European nation
wins the European civil war.

The winners in the European Civil War
are outsiders:

the Russians and the Americans -
most of all the Americans.

So that you have
the physical control of the Continent

in the hands of three outsiders -
because the British were a part of it,

although they only contributed 25%

of the whole total
to Eisenhower's Anglo-American force.

Britain, the United States and Russia
now control the Continent,

and they will decide what happens to it.

Neither Russians
nor Americans had wanted this war.

Now comrades in arms,
they have won a great victory.

When their generals meet,

they can speak the language
of combat, of tanks and guns.

But have they anything in common
except soldiers' talk?

The Russians were overjoyed -
but we also -

and there was handshaking
and back-slapping

and the exchange of souvenirs.

I have a Russian watch

and somebody's gold wedding band.

And I lost my watch.

I lost all sorts of insignia
from the uniform.

All the Russians were very friendly.
A lot of them didn't speak English.

Yet there were a few
that spoke beautiful English -

educated at Oxford and Cambridge.

I remember speaking to one,

and I thought, "I'll never forget
your face as long as I live."

"I'll never forget you."

He was rather young. He was quite
young. And he was very pleasant.

But you always kept feeling
that they really hated us,

which I'm sure they did.

The United States during the war

had been propagandised
into seeing Russia as a democracy,

a land of freedom lovers,

with essentially broad social aims
about the same as those of the West -

which seemed to make sense,

since they were clearly an enemy
of the Nazis, as we were.

Thus, it appeared
we had a great deal in common.

Fellow delegates, the President
of the United States of America.

San Francisco, April 1945,

a month before V-E Day:

the United Nations Organization is born.

The Charter of the United Nations,
which you are now signing,

is a solid structure upon which
we can build for a better world.

There was great hope in the world
that this would happen -

that this was the last war.

That the victors would now be able
to cooperate in peace,

as they had in war,
to see to it that "the four policemen?,

Britain, France, the USSR
and the United States,

sometimes "the five policemen"
with China thrown in,

would be able to see to it

that there would be
no more aggression in the world.

That the war had meant something,

that it had been fought for something,
rather than simply against Nazism.

There is a time for making plans,

and there is a time for action.

The time for action is here, now!

Nation by nation,
the delegates stand up

for the great new charter
they hammered out.

50 nations standing side by side,
unanimous for peace.

Now final signing of the charter.

China signing first, as the first nation
attacked in this war -

Dr Wellington Koo's signature
topping the long list to come.

For Russia, Ambassador Gromyko
commits his country also

to the agreements and objectives decided

after days and nights
of compromise and cooperation -

four main agencies upon which
the world now puts its hope.

A better world
was going to emerge -

a non-colonial world,
a world of self-determination.

And this was felt very deeply in 1945,

even by the most cynical
of the world's leaders.

I suspect even Stalin felt it.

I'm sure that Harry Truman felt it.

And Winston Churchill felt it.
The common people everywhere felt it.

Germany remains,
even in defeat,

the key to the problems of Europe.

She started the war,
so her leaders have to be punished.

The Germans themselves
have to be made to pay

for the suffering they have caused.

But they cannot pay
if Germany remains a heap of rubble,

or if the country is dismembered,
as some wish.

No one wants Germany to be strong again,

yet no one can face the consequences
of keeping her a ruin forever.

Military control.

Four armies of occupation
will supervise Germany's recovery.

The watchful Allied generals
will build her up,

but only in order to make good again
what she has destroyed.

Germany can remain whole, united,

but must never be able
to threaten the peace again.

July 1945.

The military administration
gets under way.

American troops have occupied Leipzig,

a city well within
the Russian zone of occupation.

Now the Americans pull back -
west, across the River Elbe.

The Russians move in.

The Germans -
wary, watchful, nervously smiling -

see their Russian conquerors
for the first time.

When the fighting stopped,
the armies ended up here.

But the occupation zones
had been decided earlier,

at the Big Three conference at Yalta.

There were to be four zones.

The Russian zone
had the food and raw materials.

The Western zones - American,
British, French - had the industry.

For the occupation to work as intended,

there would have to be trade
between them.

Berlin, the capital, became the home
of the Allied Control Council -

a testing ground
for the plan to work together.

There's been some question as to
whether we weren't a little premature

in fixing these zones until we saw
how the armies were going to come out.

And there's some evidence to indicate
that our leaders underestimated

the striking force of the Anglo-American
armies that invaded Europe,

because when we adopted
the zonal positions

we gave up Saxony and Thuringia.

But on the other hand, we got back
good pieces of Western Austria,

which had been occupied by the Soviets.

The thing that stands out here

is that the Russians
do let the West come into Berlin

which is 80 miles within their zone.

They didn't have to do it.

They could have acted in Berlin
as they acted in Poland.

They could have just said, "To hell
with you. We're not letting you in."

"We're not going to live up to
the agreements we signed at Yalta.?

"We're going to hold on to Berlin -

after all, we captured it, we paid
the cost. 100,000 Russians died."

Berlin, July 1945.

The Big Three meet
for the Potsdam Conference.

A crowded agenda
for this first meeting of victors.

But for the West,
one question dominates:

what does Stalin want?

At our first meetings,
Stalin put forward at once

the demands
which the Russians maintained

right through until the meeting
at Potsdam.

What he wanted was basically to ensure
the security of his own country,

regardless of the interests
of his neighbours.

I'd seen a good deal of him
during the war.

I went up to him and said, "This must be
a great satisfaction to you,

after all the trials
that you've been through

and the tragedy that you've
been through, to be here in Berlin."

He looked at me and said,
"Tsar Alexander got to Paris.?

The conference
takes no new decisions.

It simply confirms what was decided
at Yalta six months before.

What is new is the mood.

Despite smiles for the newsreels,

the Western leaders
and Stalin do not get on.

The feeling -
especially in the States,

and most especially
with President Truman -

was that Stalin was another Hitler.

They didn't think,
"We made a great mistake in the war

and backed the wrong side."

They were perfectly clear that Hitler
was much the greater menace.

Hitler had to be crushed,

and the crushing of Hitler absolutely
depended upon the Red Army.

The Red Army
has 300 divisions in Europe.

They are Stalin's trump card,

the source of his strength
at the conference table.

Suddenly you were faced
with the fact

that the Americans were demobilising -

or rather, at the time of Potsdam,
they were redeploying,

pulling the army out of Europe,
taking it back to the States

and getting it ready to send to Japan,

as they expected
to have to invade the home islands

for the final defeat of Japan.

I was invited to see President Truman.

And he shut all the doors
and told me in great secrecy

the greatest secret of the war:

the fact that the Americans
had an atomic bomb,

which they were going to drop
very soon,

and which he thought
would bring the war to an end.

The reason for his decision

was this would save thousands
upon thousands of Allied lives,

which would otherwise be lost

in a frightful massacre
on the shores of Japan itself.

He warned me I might find myself
suddenly in the position

with the Japanese having surrendered.

Then I saw Churchill,
and Churchill told me the same thing.

He said, "They will surrender.
What are you going to do about it?"

I said, "You've only just told me.
I haven't thought.?

August 1945.
The bomb is dropped.

The Japanese do surrender.

Their cities, too, have been laid waste,
their dreams of conquest shattered.

They, too, are at the mercy
of their conqueror.

They do not know what lies in store.

The Americans wanted Japan
rebuilt as quickly as possible,

and a highly industrialised Japan
to emerge from the war -

well within the American orbit.

Truman decided at Potsdam
that no one would be allowed into Japan

except for American troops.

The Aussies weren't let in,
the British were not let in,

and of course, most of all,
the Russians were not let in.

The conqueror comes -

General MacArthur
with his American advisers,

his American court.

He will try and remake Japan
in America's image.

The prisoners are freed -

US airmen who burnt
Japan's cities to the ground.

They are the masters now.

In Europe it is still summer.

There are 700,000
concentration camp survivors.

It may be enough to be alive,

to be reunited,

to have survived,

to go home.

Six million former slave labourers -

Poles, Russians, Yugoslavs,
Estonians, Czechs, French -

free to pick up
the threads of their lives,

now that their German masters have gone.

Prisoners of war
with no country to go to -

deportees, Germans, soldiers, deserters.

it was very difficult
to tell the difference

between a German refugee
and a Polish refugee

in the part of Germany
that I was located in -

I wouldn't know which were which.

You could be pretty well sure,

if they were humping things
on their back and carrying bags

but hadn't got a trunk,
they were almost certainly refugees.

Or perhaps SS guards
in stolen prison clothes.

Some choose death.

Himmler, lord of the SS, takes poison.

Some surrender or are caught.

Von Rundstedt, Hitler's general,
in full dress uniform.

Admiral D?nitz,
last leader of the Third Reich.

Albert Speer.

What to do with these broken monsters?

Stalin, at the Yalta Conference

that was attended
by President Roosevelt and Mr Churchill,

said that he thought 50,000

of the German general staff and officers

should be gathered together

and summarily executed.

He wasn't joking.

President Roosevelt thought he was,
and said, "Well, perhaps 49,000."

But Churchill said that he'd rather be
taken out into the garden

and shot at once
than be a party to such an iniquity.

But the Russians persisted
almost until the end

in saying that
there should be no trial -

these men were criminals
and should be immediately executed

the moment they were caught.

There is a war crimes trial
at Nuremberg, Hitler's city.

Crimes against peace,
crimes against humanity,

waging aggressive war.

The defendants are all German.

Goring is called
to plead guilty or not guilty.

I informed the court

that defendants were not entitled

to make a statement.

You must plead guilty or not guilty.

Rudolf Hess.

Nein!

That will be entered
as a plea of not guilty.

I think you'd say
the purpose was a twofold one.

The first was retribution -
the punishment of people

who had launched this war
against the world.

And not only the war, but who,

prior to the commencement
of the war and during it,

had committed the most terrible crimes
against humanity -

as, for instance, by exterminating
certainly seven million Jews.

The second purpose of the trial

was, as we hoped,

to lay down the rules
of international law for the future -

not only making
the waging of aggressive war unlawful,

but, for the first time,
making the statesmen

who led their countries
into an aggressive war

personally responsible
for what they'd done.

12 million men, women and children
have died thus -

murdered in cold blood.

Millions upon millions more today
mourn their fathers and their mothers,

their husbands, their wives
and their children.

I was rather surprised
at the appearance of the defendants.

I thought, "Well, if I'd seen
these people in the Clapham omnibus,

I wouldn't have looked at them twice.?

I think that was true of all of them,

except perhaps Hess and Ribbentrop,

who both looked
pretty miserable creatures,

and Goring, who looked
a very remarkable personality.

He did dominate the court.

He was the outstanding personality
in the court.

And sometimes, in the course of a long
trial like that, lasting over 200 days,

something would go wrong.

You would ask a witness a question,

and the answer you expected
would be "yes",

and the witness would answer "no".

At that point you had to be very careful
not to catch Goring's eye.

He was sitting at the corner
of the front row.

If you glanced across at him
or caught his eye

when there was an incident like that,

he would raise his eyebrow and shake
his head in a rather smiling way,

and it would be very difficult
not to smile back.

Goring cheats the gallows
with a cyanide pill.

The rest are hanged,
or imprisoned, or set free.

They have brought
their revolution to Germany,

and death to Europe.

Their mad adventure over,

now they pay their reckoning
for Hitler's Reich.

The British come back to Asia
in triumph.

An empty victory -

India's no longer docile.

Two million of her troops
fought for Britain in Britain's war.

Now they want their own country
to be free.

His Majesty's African troops,
they want freedom, too.

Malaya, Burma.

Britain is too weak to hold them,
even if she wants to.

The main effect of the war against Japan
in the Far East

was the nourishing
of the spirit of nationalism in Asia.

A large part of Asia
had been under British rule,

and most of that
that was not under British rule

was under Dutch rule
or some European rule,

and the people were beginning to aspire

to the creation
of their own political institutions.

The demonstration by the Japanese

that the British could be beaten,
and beaten very severely,

naturally encouraged in the eyes
of the people of Southeast Asia

the belief that they, too,
might be able to secure

a much stronger position
against the British

than they'd dreamt possible.

This had a great effect on opinion
in India and all over Southeast Asia.

Suddenly I found myself responsible,
as the supreme commander,

for an enormous area of the globe,

with a distance

of 6,000 miles across it -

as far as from London to Bombay,

with 128 million starving
and rather rebellious people

who'd just been liberated,

with 123,000 prisoners of war
and internees,

many of whom were dying and whom
I had to try and recover quickly.

And at the very beginning,

I had some 700,000
Japanese soldiers, sailors and airmen

to take the surrender, disarm,
put into prison camps,

awaiting transportation back.

It sounds a big problem, but I had
no idea what I really was in for.

What in really was in for
was trying to re-establish civilisation

and the rule of law and order

through this vast part of the world.

We didn't even know
what the conditions were going to be.

I had no staff
really trained or qualified

to help me in this task -

except some professional
civil affairs officers

from various countries concerned,
whose one idea was to go back

and carry on where they left off
three or four years before.

The police are not ideal either.

Indonesians do not want the Dutch back.

If order must be maintained
in the East Indies,

there is only one force to do it:

the Japanese army.

Mountbatten uses them there,
and in Singapore as well.

It may sound odd now, after the war,

but at the time - and it still didn't
make sense - what was I to do?

If I was to order them
to lay down their arms

and concentrate themselves
in prison camps,

and leave the outside world
without policemen or anything at all,

that would have been very odd.

No, I think they had to carry on
as they were

until they were effectively relieved -
that's the only order I gave.

I didn't consciously employ them.

They carried on until
I could relieve them

with Allied soldiers
as soon as possible.

Americans are in Japan to stay.

Almost everywhere else in Asia,
white men prepare to leave.

Reluctantly, uncomprehendingly,
the Dutch go.

The French are different -

they will not give up Indochina.

They send troops to take it back,
commanded by General Leclerc,

a hero of the European war.

When I spoke to Leclerc
when I was about to turn over

the military responsible for
the south of French Indochina to him,

I urged him to try and make friends with
local inhabitants, local insurgents.

I said, "That's the way
for France to come back -

with a friendly relationship."

"I don't think you can impose by
military means your old colonial rule."

He said, "I see the point.
I'm sorry, I'm a soldier.?

"My instructions are to take over
the military way."

And that, of course, is what he did.

So the killing goes on.

It goes on there to this day.

Berlin in the first months
of occupation.

CheeryFr?uleins,once the handmaidens
of Hitler's new order.

Some of the victors
have the time of their lives.

Germany was on
a cigarette and chocolate-bar economy

right after the war, right after combat.

As a consequence,
there was little an American soldier

couldn't buy if he wanted to buy it -

including services of all sorts.

It's the same old story -

if a boy and a girl
want to get together,

there isn't any law that says you can't
or you're not going to do it.

The black market was blooming.

We had nothing. A piece of soap

was a most valuable possession.

So...

you practically prostituted yourself,

just to get a piece of soap,
maybe a can of coffee,

or maybe even some cigarettes -
people who smoked. I didn't.

But you just did everything.

I know people - very, very fine people -
who just would have done anything.

And you lose some of your human dignity
when you are so hungry,

when you are so without food,

without clothing, without everything.

How could you blame
a starving girl?

She might not want stockings,
she might not want cigarettes,

or a bicycle, or butter,

but she did want badly something,

which could be provided

by the appropriate,
typically, British or American GI.

I had to give up
smoking in the streets.

In those days I was a cigarette smoker.

Carelessly, you'd throw your cigarette

on the floor.

Before you knew it,

a fellow had almost caught it.

He'd been trailing you
because he saw you were smoking.

I remember that in one of the cinemas
in one of the big towns

there was going to be a performance
for the American Gils.

They had queued up before it started.

The Americans don't allow smoking,
but they were all smoking in the queues.

Practically opposite every smoker,
there was a line of hungry-looking men -

hungry for tobacco -
waiting until the doors opened.

And then as the cigarettes fell
into the street, there was a rush.

The key place in that queue
was just at the entrance to the cinema,

because that's where
most of the cigarettes came down.

In retrospect, being a conqueror
seems very dubious to me,

but at the time it seemed quite right.

We were convinced of our virtue
and the German vice,

and it was very pleasing
to be able to tell them what to do.

Time to rebuild.

Time for Germany to recover,
so it can start to pay.

The Russians want
20 billion dollars in reparations.

Americans think that's more
than Germany itself is worth.

The West won't help the Russians
collect that much.

They stop sending
goods and hardware to the East.

The Russians send little food
and raw materials to the West.

The Allies are starting to fall out
with each other.

The Germans, caught in the middle,
get on with rebuilding themselves.

There are no slave labourers now.

They had cleared the street,
and trams went by.

I'd have hated to ride on one.

They were packed to the roof -

there were people hanging
on the outside, though it was cold,

there were people standing
on the buffers.

And there were patient queues
to get on these trams,

but nobody ever seemed to me to get off.

Horst Gerlach, born 4 May...

The Suchdienst-
the missing persons register.

12 million Germans,
driven from the eastern lands,

trying to find each other.

They're not alone.

60 million Europeans have been uprooted.

Some never find their way home again.

November 1945.

The Germans live
on 1500 calories a day -

a third of what the American troops get.

it was a very hard time,
because we suffered from hunger.

The Americans had much food.

My mother decided to work for them.

And I decided to work for them, 00.

My mother was in the kitchen,

and I was a waitress.

Well, it was rather hard for me,

because the Americans ordered
that I had to smile always.

And I couldn't smile, because ll...

The American officers were so proud,
and they treated us as Nazis.

No peace conference
ever takes place.

There is no new Versailles.

Germany is divided.

The occupation zones become frontiers -

unintended, unwelcome and permanent.

if you have a unified Germany
that belongs to the Russians,

you have Russian domination
of the whole of the Continent.

If you have a unified Germany that is
in the hands of the Anglo-Americans,

then you have
a Western domination of the Continent

that would cheat Russia

out of her just claims to the security

that was Stalin's number-one concern

all through the war and afterwards.

So dividing Germany along the Elbe

was probably the best solution.

One's tempted to use words
like "fair" and "just?,

but I don't think they apply here -

it's the workable solution.

Wherever the Red Army was
in 2 contiguous territory,

they would install a Sovietised system -

and there was no argument about it.

We did the very best we could on Poland.

The tragedy of Poland is that she's got
Germany for a neighbour on one side

and Russia for a neighbour on the other
side. It's a terrible position.

It's always been the Polish dilemma
and the Polish tragedy -

Poland has to fall into the orbit
of one or the other.

Given those choices, and given
the natures of Hitler and Stalin,

I suppose if I were a Pole,

I'd say, "We're better off under
Stalin's heel than under Hitler's."

Soldiers of Poland,

I wish you all a speedy and safe return
to your home country.

Poland's tragedy.
Russia's triumph.

Victory Day in Moscow.

The Russians paid
an enormous price for victory,

but they did gain from the war -

security for themselves,
control of East Europe,

and the opportunity,
which they took advantage of,

to exploit East Europe economically.

A nation bled white by war
has somehow to rebuild.

The Soviet Union has survived.

It is one of the world's great powers,

and now everyone knows it.

London, 1945.

Eros comes home.

Britain has survived, too.
But a curious victory.

You can picnic again,

but look out for unexploded mines.

No invasion, no occupation,

yet the nation's treasure is exhausted.

For six years it has fought
and been a workshop for war.

The bullets have been bought
with Britain's wealth.

They won't be needed now.

Britain has won the war,

and has nearly gone bankrupt doing it.

The British had as many problems,
if not more, in recovering from victory

as the Germans did
in recovering from defeat.

The British... What did Britain
get out of the war?

Not very much. Not very much.
She lost a very great deal.

I suppose, if you want
to look at it positively,

she got a moral claim on the world

as the nation that had
stood against Hitler alone for a year,

and had provided the moral leadership
against the Nazis

at a time when everyone else
was willing to cave in to the Nazis.

America, 1945.

The boys come home - again.

The big winner
in World War II

is the United States
of America - by far.

We get much more out of the war
than anyone else.

There's a paradox here -
very quickly after the war was over,

"Aha! Here it is again."

"We got fooled once more,
as we did in World War IL."

"We made this enormous effort,

we beat the Germans,
we beat the Japanese.?

"And who wins? The Russians.
The Russians get East Europe out of it."

"We were suckers."

This was very widely felt
in the United States.

It was a strange attitude to hold
when you look,

with whatever objectivity
that one can muster,

at what the real results
of the war were.

Americans come home
to a country untouched by bombs,

a country twice as rich
as when the war began -

more food than it can eat,

more clothes than it can wear,

more steel than it can use.

The only country in the world
with money to spare.

The country with the atom bomb.

The Germans, too, are victors -
though they do not know it yet.

The soldiers come home
from internment camps,

put on ordinary clothes,
go back to work.

Feudal, Prussian, peasant Germany
is no more.

In its place,
the structure of a modern state.

Ironically enough,
that was Hitler's work.

Now, in the West,
anew Germany will emerge:

rich and free and democratic -
and strong.

England, too, changes -
though some voices stay the same.

You will be taken
to the civilian clothing depot

to get your civilian suit.

After that, a bus
will take you down to the station.

You're free then
to push off home as fast as you can.

The procedure is comprehensive -

there are a lot of things
to be thought of

when a man or a woman
leaves the army.

Civilian life nowadays
is fairly full of snags,

and the ex-soldier
must be armed against them

when he marches into civvy street.

Information pamphlet.
14-day ration card.

- Good luck. Thanks for all you've done.
- Thank you, sir.

- AC Clott?
- Sir! 252.

Britain's soldiers come home,

to a land without much cheer,

to a land of ration cards, queues,
black markets and austerity.

But to a land of National Health

and the welfare state.

To a land of free men and women.

To a world no longer at war.

In the first place,
if we hadn't won the war,

it would have meant
that the Japanese and the Germans

would have won it.

I think you can imagine what kind
of a world that would have been.

It's true that the problem of Russia -
the Soviet Union, rather -

emerged sharply after the war.

But I would say on the whole

that that was the lesser of
the two evils that could have happened.

And the more or less principles
on which democracies operate,

on which societies are based,

certainly didn't get much satisfaction
out of the results of the war -

but I think this was inevitable,
given the Soviet system.

On the other hand, there's still
a large portion of the world

that still is able to exercise
a certain degree of freedom,

particularly in their internal affairs.

Not that by any means

that everything that isn't communist
is perfect - far from it.

But I think the world
would have been quite intolerable

under Nazi and Japanese rule.

The principal effects of the war
on people and political systems

bore upon the countries
in Eastern Europe -

Poland most of all, Czechoslovakia,
Hungary, Romania and those countries.

These peoples were hoping,
or some of them were hoping,

that the war would liberate them
from the threat of Nazi tyranny,

and in fact at the end of it they found
themselves in the communist bloc -

which I must say was far less sinister
than the Nazi bloc.

This was a very solid achievement
of the Second World War -

a very much less sinister
type of tyranny

replaced a highly sinister tyranny.

But this was not the freedom
for which they had hoped,

and for which, to a large extent,
we had fought.

The most important single result
of World War II

is that the Nazis were crushed,

the militarists in Japan were crushed,
the Fascists in Italy were crushed.

Surely justice
has never been better served.

For 30 years now,
there has been peace in Europe.