War of the Century (1999–…): Season 1, Episode 1 - High Hopes - full transcript

WAR OF THE CENTURY

The Soviet Union fought and won the
biggest war of the 20th century -

a war in which more than
30 million people died.

Close to Red Square,
in a private museum

in the General Staff headquarters,
lie trophies of that war,

snatched from an enemy
which had been crushed.

Ten million German soldiers
were captured, wounded or killed.

The scale of Germany's defeat
was unprecedented in her history.

So it's hardly surprising that Hitler's
decision to invade the Soviet Union

has come to be seen as a catastrophic
mistake - almost the action of a madman.

But that's not what
many people thought at the time.



HIGH HOPES

Communism had always been a repugnant
and dangerous ideology to the Nazis.

And when, in the 1930s, the Nazis looked
at the Communist regime in the Soviet Union,

they hated and
they feared what they saw.

At the heart of this world conspiracy,
as the Nazis saw it, was one man.

Someone whose character would help shape and
determine the course of the forthcoming war

Joseph Stalin.

Boris Godunov, Stalin's favourite opera.

A story of suspicious death,
intrigue and a Tzar's double-dealing.

The Nazis watched as, beginning in 1937,

Stalin purged the Red Army of anyone
suspected of the merest hint of disloyalty.

Seven thousand army
officers were sent to the GULAG.

Another 35.000 were expelled
from the armed forces.

In 1939 the newly purged Red Army
invaded Finland.



The Soviets had a more than two
to one advantage over the Finns,

and the Germans took careful
notice of what happened next.

In the summer of 1940, only months after
the Soviet army had failed in Finland,

Adolf Hitler celebrated
the Nazis' conquest of France.

But despite these ecstatic scenes,
Hitler knew he still had a problem.

Great Britain wouldn't make peace, and
a German invasion across the English Channel

remained a risky option.
So Hitler's eyes turned to the Soviet Union.

In spite of signing a non-aggression
pact with Stalin in 1939,

Hitler still considered the Soviets
his ideological enemy.

By invading the Soviet Union,
Hitler believed he would eliminate

the greatest potential threat the Nazis
faced on mainland Europe

and gain living space and
raw materials for the Germans.

He thought his three-pronged attack
would also destroy any hopes the British had

that the Soviet Union
might one day come to their aid.

At the time, to his military planners,
all this seemed perfectly logical.

At the time this film was taken,
during Red Army military exercises

in the autumn of 1940, the Soviet High
Command knew of German troop movements East.

But what did it mean?
Was the Soviet Union about to be invaded?

Surely, Stalin felt, Hitler would not
embark on a war against the Soviet Union

while still
fighting the British.

In Spring 1941, some senior officers in
the Red Army, including Georgy Zhukov,

suggested one option was to mount
a pre-emptive strike against the Germans.

Stalin never approved the plan.
He wanted to do nothing to provoke Hitler,

and still didn't believe the Germans
would risk an invasion.

This recently declassified Soviet
lntelligence report, dated June 1941,

predicts that the German army
will attack at any moment.

Stalin has scrawled over it:
"Comrade Merkulov,

you can send your
source from the headquarters

of the German Air Force
to his fucking mother."

"He is not a source, but a dis-informant."

But Stalin's spies were right.
The Germans were about to invade.

An armed force of
more than three million Germans

and their allies massed along
an invasion front of 1.800 miles.

This bridge over the river Bug was just
one of hundreds of crossing points.

At 3.15 on the morning of June 22nd 1941,

the German invasion began.

I enjoyed the strength of our army sending
thousands of shells

into the Russian border line
defences and so on, so it was -

partly a great feeling also about
the power being unleashed against

the dubious and despisable enemy.

We had been victorious in Yugoslavia in
Norway and in France and so and so on.

So we felt we might make it -
because we are experienced troops.

We were well trained, well equipped.

So we might make it, maybe.

By the end of the first week
of the invasion

150.000 Soviet soldiers
were dead or severely wounded,

and the Germans were more than 200 miles
inside Soviet territory.

The tactic of Blitzkrieg,
the lightning attack,

was the chief reason
for the Germans' success.

Conventional military theory had said
that armoured attack should be in waves,

but the Germans' tanks, artillery
and Stuka dive bombers

all focused their attacks simultaneously
on one narrow point of the enemy line.

The whole Panzer
spearhead advanced swiftly

on a front sometimes
no wider than one road.

Then the German infantry forced
on through the gap

and encircled the confused Soviet troops.

Some Soviet troops surrendered.

Others retreated and watched as
their officers deserted them.

In Moscow, Stalin was at first unaware
of the extent of the military disaster.

Until he attended a meeting here,
at the Commissariat of Defence on June 29th.

Stalin studied the maps,
heard the briefing,

and learnt that Germans
were advancing on all fronts.

Whole Soviet armies
had been encircled and destroyed.

It looked inevitable that Minsk, the capital
of Belorussia, would shortly be captured.

It was much worse than Stalin had feared.

Stalin stormed out of the meeting, saying:

"Lenin left us with a great legacy.
We, his heirs, we fucked it up."

As the rest of the world learned
of the Germans' advance,

many were pessimistic
about the Soviets' chances.

The US Secretary of the Navy
wrote to President Roosevelt

that it would take between six weeks and two
months for Hitler to clean up in Russia.

The British War Office told the BBC
not to give out the impression

that Soviet armed resistance would
last more than six weeks.

The Soviet Union and Stalin
seemed to be facing catastrophe.

One of the greatest secrets
concealed in Russian archives

is whether or not at this
desperate moment the Soviets

tried to contact
the Germans to negotiate peace.

It has long been rumoured that
an approach was made,

but no document from the Communist
period has ever been found to confirm

what happened - until now.

One of the consultants
for this programme recently uncovered

a top secret report from a Soviet
intelligence office called Pavel Sudoplatov.

The report tells how, on the orders
of the head of the secret police,

Lavrenty Beria, there was
a meeting held at the Aragvi,

a Georgian restaurant
in the centre of Moscow.

Sudoplatov met the ambassador of Bulgaria,

the country which now represented Germany
in the Soviet Union.

They met at the end of July 1941,

in Beria's private room,
high above the main dining room.

Sudoplatov asked the Bulgarian ambassador

if he could find out whether
Germany would make peace

in exchange for large portions
of Soviet territory.

No one can be sure if this was a
genuine attempt to buy the Germans off

or a way of stalling for time.

After the war, victory won, the very
fact of the meeting was cause for shame.

Pavel Sudoplatov, the man who ate the meal,
was charged with treason.

For this and other alleged crimes,
he was sentenced to 15 years in the GULAG.

But the Germans were not about to let
the Soviet Union make peace -

even a humiliating one.

When we made 30-40 kilometres a day
we said,

"Well, we can see that our Blitzkrieg
tactics still also works in Russia."

It was professionalism.
We are better,

where we come we will clean that up,
that was absolutely sure.

As the avalanche
of Soviet prisoners continued,

the very sight of them confirmed in many
German soldiers their own racist beliefs.

Hitler despised the entire
Slavic population of the Soviet Union

and declared this conflict
to be a war of annihilation.

But he felt
a special hatred for the Jews,

believing that Moscow was the home
of a Judaeo-Bolshevist world conspiracy.

Having joined the Hitler Youth
when he was ten years old,

Carlheinz Behnke volunteered
for the Waffen SS in 1940.

While special killing squads
in the occupied territories

were hunting down one hated enemy,
the Jews,

ordinary Germans soldiers
like these were expected to cooperate

in the elimination
of the Soviet commissars,

the political officers
within each army unit.

This infamous order
calling for German soldiers

to select and hand over Soviet commissars

to be shot
was issued before the war began.

One of the witness signatures
on the order is that of Bernhard Bechler,

an officer
in the German Army's high command.

There were German divisions who didn't carry
out the commissar order, but most did.

From the beginning of the war in the East,
the leadership of the Germany army

was complicit in the criminal policies
of the Nazis.

Another consequence of the war
the war was conceived

was the mistreatment
of the Soviet prisoners of war.

Here being fed scraps of food
by their German guards.

This document from the Wehrmacht's
economic agency for the East,

dated May 1941, casts light
on why the German army

didn't care about their prisoners of war.
It predicts that in the forthcoming war:

"Tens of millions of men
will undoubtedly starve to death

if we take away all
we need from the country."

Once the war had begun, Göring even joked:
"Things have got out of hand."

"Soviet prisoners
have just eaten one of our German guards."

But it wasn't only the Germans
who were fighting a cruel and brutal war.

Just before the Red Army retreated,

Stalin's secret police killed
many of their political prisoners.

And on the battlefield, as these
photographs of mutilated bodies show,

Soviet forces were capable of venting
their fury on captured German prisoners.

It was completely different type of war.
This was the kind of brutality,

doing it that way, and that made -
also that made us furious when you see

your friend there brutally killed,
and the reaction was from our side

that people didn't want to fall wounded
into their hands and they shot themselves.

I still remember a young officer from the -
our infantry regiment I knew very well,

who was left behind wounded and
when we got back in our counter attack,

he had shot himself in the meantime.

We could have
rescued him otherwise as a wounded one.

And thereafter we decided
that will never happen to me myself.

We kept always
the last bullet for ourselves.

In August 1941, Adolf Hitler
visited the captured city of Minsk.

In less than two months his Nazi empire had
expanded 400 miles into the Soviet Union.

But problems still existed.

German forces had advanced so far
and so fast

that there were difficulties supplying
them on the bad Soviet roads.

And Blitzkrieg as a tactic had been designed
to conquer countries the size of France.

Whether the same strategy would work
in a country forty times bigger

had always been a gamble.

As Hitler
studied the situation map that August,

he saw that in places the Red Army was
putting up more resistance than expected.

West of Kiev,
the German army was finding it hard going.

So Hitler ordered his army groups to
capture the city in a pincer movement

and delayed the advance on Moscow.

Nearly a million Soviet troops
were positioned to protect Kiev

and the surrounding area.

But Soviet defence tactics
were still extremely primitive

and no match for German Blitzkrieg.

These forces were simply ordered
to stand fast and wait for the Germans.

In the face of the oncoming Panzers,
the Soviet commanders of Kiev believed

that they were in danger of being encircled.
They communicated their fears to Stalin,

in messages received by
Stalin's personal telegraphist.

Stalin's stubbornness led to more than 40
Soviet divisions being trapped around Kiev,

many cut off by the Dnieper River.

650.000 Soviet soldiers were
captured at the battle of Kiev.

It was the largest encirclement
in military history.

The situation was desperate for the
Soviet Union. Leningrad was surrounded,

and Kiev, Minsk and Smolensk
were now all in German hands.

The Red Army was floundering.

Many of its recruits were
poorly equipped and badly trained.

This propaganda archive shows each
new soldier at least receiving a rifle -

but the reality could be very different

The town of Vyazma,
just 130 miles West of Moscow,

now stood between the German army
and the Soviet capital.

In October 1941,
this was the site of a battle in which,

in 12 days,
150.000 Soviet soldiers were killed.

More dead than the British lost
in the five months of the Somme.

Out on the great plains of Vyazma
stood five Soviet armies.

Just as at Kiev,
the Soviet forces were swiftly encircled.

Desperate to escape, Soviet soldiers even
attacked the German line without weapons.

The first line had rifles,
the second line had even no rifles,

they took the rifles from the dead.
No German soldier

would have attacked without any weapon.
lncredible for us.

You are destined to attack
even without weapons.

If you are -
there will be weapons of the dead.

The German Panzer
units held the high ground

and looked down on the
Soviet forces trapped in the plain.

I saw one of these attacks coming.

We are sitting
on top of the hills and then -

like a herd of vehicles and men
coming up by the thousands.

And what I always say,
make your blood freezing.

And then the Russians came into the ground
where the creek was there,

it was a swampy area, and then all
the vehicles at once sunk in the mud,

then the people coming out are now like
a herd of sheep coming against us.

And then, also let them come,
let them get near,

let them come on, and then at the same time
our machine guns then mowed them down.

They were lying then by the thousands, like
the battlefields of the old history there.

In another part of the encirclement,
some of the Soviet soldiers

ran into Wolfgang Horn and his men.

The Russians came out of the forest and
the Russians were so cowardly

that some of the crew of these
tracks hovered behind the vehicle,

took cover,
and bent down forward totally,

crouching on the ground
and not moving at all.

Ruki verkh, I said,
Ruki verkh, raise your hands.

And he didn't, they pretended to be dead,
and we started shooting them, naturally.

Under the impact of the bullets,
they wavered a shook a bit.

Wolfgang Horn is still convinced he was right
to kill those crouching Soviet soldiers.

When they don't raise their hands,
what can we do? What can they do?

They might throw hand grenades,
they might what can they do?

If they don't surrender, we shoot them.

It was natural for us to do,
and we joined -

several ones joined me and
we naturally shot them all.

Crouching there, cowards,
they didn't deserve any better anyhow.

That was our feeling.

That October, with German soldiers
winning victories at Vyazma

and the nearby battle of Vyansk,
German newspapers announced

that the war was as good as won.

SOVIETS DEFEATED!

SUCCESS ON THE EASTERN CAMPAIGN ASSURED!

EUROPE IS SAVED, FREED FROM STALIN
BY THE FÜHRER'S MILITARY GENIUS.

The Germans had now captured
nearly three million Soviet soldiers.

The Germans pressed on towards Moscow,

where in mid-October only
90.000 men stood defending the capital.

Stalin called on General
Zhukov to prepare the defence of Moscow,

and told Zhukov to meet him
at his dacha.

When Zhukov arrived,
he heard Stalin talking to Beria.

In the 1960s Zhukov confided
to a military historian

just what he had overhead Stalin saying,

but this was not a story the Soviet people
could hear until after perestroika.

Only now, because of the discovery
of the secret document dating

the first meeting to July,
is there evidence of at least two separate

discussions within the Soviet leadership
about approaching the Germans.

Panic was growing inside Moscow
as the Germans neared the city.

Maya Berzina rushed
with her three year old son

to the city's southern port
on the river Moscow.

Crammed on board one of the last ships
to leave, they fled the capital.

Now the question was, would Stalin
and his entourage desert Moscow too?

Evidence that they were about to leave
is provided by this recently

declassified document signed by Stalin
and dated by him 15th October 1941.

"The state defence committee has
resolved to evacuate today

the Praesidium of the Supreme Soviet and
the top levels of government."

"Comrade Stalin will leave tomorrow
or later, depending on the situation."

At Moscow's Yaroslavski railway station,

Stalin's armoured train waited
to head East towards the Ural mountains.

On the night of October 16th, having been
ordered to clear his office in the Kremlin,

Nikolay Ponomariov sat on the train
and waited to leave Moscow.

But the train didn't leave. Stalin
decided to stay and defend the capital.

On October 19th, he ordered his secret
police to quash the panic in Moscow

by whatever means necessary.

Vladimir Ogryzko and his unit of secret
police prevented Muscovites from fleeing.

They stopped cars and overturned them
sometimes with the drivers still inside.

As winter came,
German soldiers were at the gates of Moscow.

They had covered more ground more quickly
and captured more prisoners

than any army ever had before.
But according to their original plan,

by now they should already
have won the war.