War of the Century (1999–…): Season 1, Episode 2 - Spiral of Terror - full transcript

WAR OF THE CENTURY

More civilians died
during the War in the East

than in any other conflict in history.

It's estimated that
as many as 13 million

Soviet civilians died under
the German occupation.

Why did this war result
in such human catastrophe?

SPIRAL OF TERROR

As winter came in 1941, the Germans
advanced on Moscow in Operation Typhoon.

The Germans had covered 600 miles since
their invasion of the Soviet Union

the previous June, and captured
three million Red Army prisoners.

But they had expected the war to
be won before the onset of winter.



Now, with their supply lines stretched
almost to breaking behind them,

they found themselves still battling
on towards the Soviet capital.

Up to Moscow, we said there's
a good chance to win the war,

or at least to win
the battle in Russia.

I was a signals officer with the
battalion staff, artillery battalion,

putting together the maps of the surroundings
of Moscow, very good quality maps,

and the measuring and putting in
the positions of our batteries.

I measured this distance to
the Kremlin, said, what the hell,

if we had long range cannon
we could shoot at the Kremlin.

And then the whole night the guys were
shooting, always shooting at the Kremlin.

In November 1941, just days before the
Germans came in artillery range of Kremlin,

Stalin recorded a speech
to rally the Soviet people.

But Stalin also knew that these
troops might not stay and fight.

Many of the Red Army
had turned and retreated



in the face of the German
Blitzkrieg that summer.

Now, Stalin determined, his soldiers
would be made to hold their ground.

Just behind the front line, he ordered
blocking detachments to assemble.

They had one simple task -
if Red Army soldiers ran past them,

then they were to shoot them dead.

An estimated 8.000 Red Army
soldiers were executed for cowardice

or desertion in the winter of 1941.

As the Soviet resistance grew harsher,
so did the weather.

This was not a war for which
the Germans had planned.

Then the Red Army counter attacked,
using reinforcements,

many drawn from the East
of the Soviet Union.

When this film was taken in December 1941,
the war was not going to plan for Hitler.

The Germans now found
themselves at war with America,

as a result of the Japanese
bombing of Pearl Harbour,

and the German army faced
desperate problems before Moscow.

Hitler responded to the
crisis in a brutal way.

He ordered the inadequately equipped
German army to bear any losses

but to stay where they were.

Heinz Guderian, one of his most successful
generals, protested at the order.

Hitler baldly stated: "Do you think
Frederick the Great's grenadiers

enjoyed dying for
their country either?"

The temperature that winter dropped
to minus 43 degrees Celsius.

But on all fronts the Germans
tried to stand their ground.

It was easy for Hitler to say:
"Stand firm".

Soldiers were overwhelmed by
fatigue and couldn't think straight.

Nearly numbed by fatigue.

But that may have made them
more willing to obey orders.

No step backwards, we must hold
the line. No step backwards.

Those who retreat will be shot.
That kind of thing.

So we just stayed there in our
bunkers, not too happy about it.

The infantries,
they had to sleep in the open.

You could tried to
make a hole in the snow

and then was the order that
a guard had to go every two hours

to make sure that you were still alive,
otherwise you could freeze to death.

It is a very nice death,
but you don't want to have it.

And particularly if you had
been sweating during the day,

and then cooling off during the night,

that was the greatest danger
that you would freeze to death.

The crisis was over as both sides
bogged down in the spring thaw of 1942.

The Red Army had prevented the
Germans from taking Moscow,

but did not yet possess the tactics or
the equipment to defeat the invaders.

The battle of Moscow had demonstrated the
ruthlessness of both Hitler and Stalin,

a ruthlessness that was to be
one of the defining reasons

why this war became
as brutal as it did.

During 1942, Hitler moved his
headquarters from the Wolf's Lair

in East Prussia to
Vinnitsa in the Ukraine.

This is all that remains of Hitler's
forward headquarters at Vinnitsa.

From here, he oversaw not just
the battle on the front line,

but also German rule of
the occupied territories.

And how the Nazis chose to
govern their conquered lands

would be another crucial factor in
making the War in the East so cruel.

From the outset of the invasion, Hitler had
made clear that this was no ordinary war.

"There is only one duty -

to Germanise this country by
the immigration of Germans

and to look upon the
natives as redskins."

As Hitler saw it, the people
of the occupied territories,

including the Ukrainians
who now lived around him,

should be denied even basic schooling.

"The locals should be educated
just enough to understand

our highway signs so that they won't
get themselves run over by our vehicles."

When the Germans had first occupied
the Ukraine the previous summer,

they had been welcomed
by many local people.

To these Ukrainians, the Germans
promised relief from the rule of Stalin,

rule which in the 1930s had
brought them collectivisation,

oppression and mass starvation.

Aleksey Bris, a fluent German speaker, began
to work for the Nazis as an interpreter.

But the Nazis were not about to create
a better life for the Ukrainians.

To begin with, Hitler cast an envious eye
on the country's agricultural produce.

"It is inconceivable that amorphous masses
which contribute nothing to civilization

occupy infinite tracts of a soil that
is one of the richest in the world."

True to Hitler's belief, the Germans set
about stealing food from the Ukrainians

and transporting much
of it back to Germany.

Ein Freund, ein guter Freund, das
ist das Beste, was es gibt auf der Welt.

Ein Freund bleibt immer Freund,
auch wenn die ganze Welt zusammenfällt.

Drum sei auch nie betrübt,
wenn dein Schatz dich nicht mehr liebt.

Ein Freund, ein guter Freund,
das ist der größte Schatz, den's gibt.

The man Hitler appointed to oversee
this exploitation was Erich Koch,

one of the hardest of
the hard-line Nazis.

The way Koch chose to run Kiev, and
the rest of his fiefdom of the Ukraine,

was to be one of the first tests of just
how brutal the Nazi occupation would be.

Koch was guided by his own maxim
that the lowliest German worker

was a thousand times more valuable
than the population of the Ukraine.

Koch's boss, Alfred Rosenberg,
disagreed with this approach.

Although a committed Nazi himself, he
wanted the co-operation of the Ukrainians

and was even prepared for them to have
a limited independence under the Nazis.

Koch and Rosenberg clashed, with
Koch contemptuous of his superior.

The dispute reached Hitler.
And his position was clear,

as the minutes from a meeting
he had with Koch record.

Both the Fuhrer and Reich Commissar
Koch reject an independent Ukraine.

Besides, hardly anything will
be left standing in Kiev.

To the Nazis,
the Jews were the most hated enemy.

This propaganda film shows Jews
being forced to work for the Germans

in the occupied territories.
But by the autumn of 1941

the Nazis were also hunting
down and killing Jewish men,

women and children, often with
the help of the local population.

Viktoria lvanova was nine
years old when in 1942

she witnessed the
betrayal of her mother.

Although Jews, Gypsies and Communist Party
members were singled out by the Germans,

the rest of the population
also lived in fear,

for this was an occupation
based on terror.

We came for them as
a kind of liberators,

liberating them from the Bolshevistic,
Communist system,

and my personal opinion is the Nazis
were too stupid to exploit that.

We could have
really come as liberators.

But with their idea of the Herrenmensch,
that they were second class human beings,

that was ridiculous,
the feeling we never had in the army.

The idea that responsibility
for the suffering of civilians

in the occupied territories rests
solely with dedicated Nazis is disproved

by what happened here in Kharkov
in the East of the Ukraine.

Because it was near the front line,
Kharkov was administered by the army,

and they pursued the same exploitation
policy as Nazis like Koch.

German soldiers sealed the city

and stopped the population
getting food from the countryside.

Only those who worked for the
Germans were given rations.

As a consequence,
thousands began to starve.

They didn't pay much
attention to people dying.

I think they thought it was a norm.

I don't think they were shocked.

No, they weren't.
They took it easy I'm afraid.

I wouldn't like to think so,

but I'm afraid that it was so.
They took it easy.

At first they killed dogs and ate dogs,

but dogs didn't last long.

Either they had escaped
or they had been killed.

People ate rats, pigeons, crows.

Inna Gavrilchenko was
luckier than most.

She had occasional work in
a German-run slaughterhouse

and sometimes could take
home a bottle of cow's blood.

Blood, if you know, you can
make an omelette with blood.

Just as you make scrambled eggs.

So without this is an
omelette without eggs.

I was just filling my stomach,
if I could afford it.

And all people who
could afford it did it.

Have you ever tried just
the bark of a birch tree?

I can advise you, it is sweetish.

It is not exactly sweet, but sweetish.

You can try it. And you can try,

the leaves and the,
young twigs of Jasmine.

It is eatable.

There are a lot of eatable things,
that you hate to think of today.

Around one hundred
thousand civilians died

during the German occupation of
Kharkov, many of them children.

Among the children who suffered
during the German occupation

was six year old Anatoly Reva.

From the first days of the war,
Stalin had called for the people

of the occupied territories to
fight back against the Germans.

As a result, this was to become
the biggest guerrilla war yet seen.

These partisans included not just
those who had fled from the Germans

and run to the forests, but also special
Ministry of Interior guerrilla fighters

who were infiltrated behind enemy
lines - men like Mikhail Timoshenko.

The Soviets staged the supposed
exploits of the partisans

for their propaganda newsreels.

This hidden, inconvenient
truth about the partisan war,

for the way it was conducted helped
escalate the brutality of the conflict.

To start with,
Soviet partisans did not look kindly

on any German prisoners they captured.

Soviet propaganda showed well behaved
partisans accepting food from locals,

happy to contribute
to the Communist cause.

The reality could be
very different indeed.

From Moscow Stalin controlled
the direction of the partisan war.

In an act which was to heighten
the terror in the occupied territories,

he approved an order calling on
the partisans not just to kill Germans

but also to kill any Soviet citizen
they believed might be helping them

a command that was often interpreted
to mean that the suspect's relatives

should be killed as well.

Stalin's desire was to remind those of his
subjects who were now under German rule

that they could still not
escape his vengeance.

It was a recipe for anarchy.

The widespread terror
wrought by the partisans

was not a story the Communists
wished to tell after the war.

This rare archive shows a woman
hanged by the partisans

and displayed to the rest of
the population as a warning.

This secret partisan report,
declassified for this program,

complains that amongst one
large partisan division:

"Drunkenness, robbery, beatings and
rape are universal occurrences."

One of the suspected murderers
was partisan Efim Goncharov.

Before the war he had
been the local teacher.

The Communists never held any
investigations into these killings.

After the war,
Efim Goncharov was given a medal

and became chairman of
the district committee.

The partisans became a growing
problem for the German occupiers.

If the Germans suspected a village
had been used as a partisan base,

then it was common practice
to burn it to the ground.

We saw empty trenches and
spent bullets lying around,

so the partisans had been there
and shooting at us and had run away.

So I gave the order, "Pour out gas,"

and spread some straw
and set them afire.

And we burnt the houses.
We didn't take it so seriously to say,

fire a Russian house or damage
them and so on and so on.

So that they were on
a lower level practically.

So we didn't respect them
as civilised as we are.

On the one hand I didn't regret
it too much because I knew

what is the worth of a Russian house?
They are so primitive anyhow.

But all in all, it's not much
value in it, in such a house.

And they will survive.
That was my feeling.

Not comparable to a German house
or an English house

or French house or so on,
not at all.

The cows were stolen
also and brought back.

But you also stole their pigs,
didn't you? - Yes.

What were they supposed to eat if
you'd taken their food from them?

I know. They had vegetables.

But didn't you feel that it
was dishonorable to make war

on women and children in this way?
- Yes, naturally.

We didn't shoot them. We let them live.
It was the best we could do.

Many of them might have died
as a result. It was cold.

Yes, I know, it could have happened.

But we know Russians are quite
resourceful, in coping with cold.

They could easily fell new trees,
build shelters, just like we did.

What would you say then to someone
who would say you burning down

that village was a war crime?
- Yes, maybe it is a war crime.

But there was the order, so I did it.

In the Ukraine, the Germans' brutal rule
helped create a new partisan movement,

one which was to wreak further havoc.

Ukrainians had always been
fiercely nationalistic,

and now that their hopes for an
independent Ukraine had been crushed,

many took up arms
against the invaders.

Thousands of Ukrainians left the towns
and sought refuge in the forests.

Even some of those who had previously
collaborated with the Germans,

like Aleksey Bris.

Bris joined the Ukrainian
nationalist partisans,

a third force which hated not just the
Germans but the Soviet partisans as well,

and conducted a bloody war, rich in
atrocities, against both of them.

Around Bris's town of Gorokhov,
as elsewhere in the Ukraine,

the Soviet partisans took revenge against
supporters of the Ukrainian partisans.

And it wasn't just the Ukrainian
partisans who suffered such a fate.

These film rushes, never shown to
the German public during the war,

reveal Soviet mutilation
of German prisoners.

Actions like these only served to
escalate the level of the German reprisal.

Hitler would not have been concerned
by these arbitrary killings.

At the start of the war, when he learnt
of Stalin's call for partisan action,

Hitler had remarked: "This
partisan war has its advantages."

"It gives us a chance to eliminate
anyone who turns against us."

Hitler believed that only by
terrorising the local population

would the partisans be defeated.

But the policy of ever-escalating terror
reprisals did not appear to be working.

In November 1942, the head of the German
army's intelligence agency for the East,

Colonel Reinhard Gehlen,
argued for a different approach.

He called for the locals to be
encouraged to help the Germans

and said that the current Nazi idea of
treating the Soviets as inferior was:

"An error of the most grievous kind."

Hitler disagreed. He had reached
an entirely different conclusion.

"Only where the struggle against
the partisan nuisance was begun

and carried out with ruthless
brutality have successes been achieved."

The result was a greater emphasis
on a huge anti-partisan operations

which swept over the occupied
territories leaving chaos in their wake.

During these raids, occasionally some
villages would remain in their homes,

thinking that because they were
innocent they would be safe.

A brother killed by Hitler's army,
a sister killed by Stalin's partisans,

that was Nadezhda Nefyodova's
experience of this war.

It was obvious that the Germans
were not now too scrupulous about

who they defined as a partisan.

Peter von der Groeben was a senior
officer with German Army Group Centre.

He read and initialed a report on
one of the anti-partisan actions,

Operation Otto, in his capacity as 1A,
Chief of Operations.

It details 1920 partisans
and their helpers

killed by soldiers of his army group.

But only 30 rifles and a handful of
other weapons were ever recovered.

More than 90 percent of those
killed by the Germans had no guns.

In the Belorussian
village of Maksimauka,

the Germans conducted
another anti-partisan sweep.

Their actions here
demonstrated how cheap a life

in the occupied
territories had now become.

There were many reasons why such huge numbers
of innocent people died in this war -

in particular the Nazi drive for
an empire based on racial dominance,

the atrocities of the partisans
together with the German reprisals,

and the character
of Hitler and Stalin,

two men who believed that terror
could only be beaten by more terror.

But no matter how much
the innocent suffered,

the war itself could not
be won with their blood.

This war would only be
decided on the battlefield,

in a savage conflict that echoed the
brutality of the actions behind the lines.