War of the Century (1999–…): Season 1, Episode 4 - Vengence - full transcript

WAR OF THE CENTURY

Auschwitz. The crimes Hitler and
the Nazis committed here are infamous.

Less well known are the crimes the
Communists committed at the same time.

This memorial, only recently
erected in the remote steppes,

commemorates just one of
Stalin's terror reprisals,

the forced deportation of
an entire ethnic population.

As the war between Hitler
and Stalin came to a close,

the innocent were to
suffer as never before.

VENGEANCE

As the Germans retreated,
they destroyed.

Adolf Hitler oversaw this brutal
retreat from his headquarters here



in the forest of Rastenburg in
the eastern part of Germany.

Hitler had ordered the invasion
of the Soviet Union in 1941

and expected the war to be
over in a matter of weeks.

Now, three years later, everyone around him
knew the German army was losing the war.

In June 1944, the military situation,
already bad, grew even worse for Hitler.

Not only had the allies
invaded France on D-Day,

but in the East the Red Army was preparing
one of the biggest offensives of the war.

On June 23rd,
over these fields in Belorussia,

more than two million Red Army soldiers
attacked the Germans in Operation Bagration.

The Soviets faced about twice
as many Germans as their allies

did in the wake of D-Day in France.

The German army, so skilled in the
art of lightning armoured attack,

proved less successful in defence.

Hitler was obsessed with the idea that
individual strength of will almost alone



could hold back a Red Army which was
better equipped and superior in numbers.

He called for the formation
of fortified places.

The theory was that German units would
allow themselves to become encircled

and then mount successful counter
attacks behind the Soviet line.

But that's not how
the plan worked out.

A combination of Hitler's refusal
to let his troops withdraw

and the surprise and scale
of the Red Army attack

made Operation Bagration
the biggest Soviet victory of the war.

Four hundred thousand German soldiers were
captured, seriously wounded or killed.

The Red Army had evolved from the
badly equipped and badly trained force

of 1941 into one of the world's
most powerful fighting machines.

At the point of the Germans'
farthest advance in November 1942,

they had reached more than
a thousand miles into Soviet territory.

But by August 1944 the Red Army
was at the gates of Warsaw.

Stalin re-imposed his will
quickly and ruthlessly

on the newly liberated
population of the Soviet Union,

particularly on the
ethnic minorities.

The Kalmyks were some
of the first to suffer.

The bleak Kalmyk steppe was the furthest
point east the German army had reached.

It was home to a people with
a Buddhist tradition whose culture

and religion were brutally suppressed
by the Communists during the 1930s.

Stalin was particularly suspicious
of ethnic groups like these Kalmyks,

fearing that one day they might
want to be free of the Soviet Union,

a suspicion fuelled by the fact
that during the German occupation

a minority of Kalmyks had
collaborated with the Nazis.

Now Stalin decided that the innocent
should suffer along with the guilty.

Stalin wanted to deport
all Kalmyks to Siberia.

So after the Red Army
had recaptured Kalmykia

he send in the secret police,
the NKVD.

In the early hours, the NKVD acted.

While the small minority of Russians
who lived in Kalmykia were left alone,

the secret police entered
the homes of every one

of the tens of thousands
of ethnic Kalmyks.

But there were thousands of Kalmyks
who weren't at home

when the secret police called.

They were on the front line, fighting
in the Red Army against the Germans.

Aleksey Badmaev had won awards for
bravery and for the defence of Stalingrad.

But these medals were no protection.
Stalin ordered

that even Kalmyk fighters on
the front line be arrested and deported.

Stalin presided over
the deportation not just of the Kalmyks

but other ethnic groups like
the Tartars, the Balkars and the Chechens.

In total, more than a million people
were taken from their homeland

and sent on trains to Siberia and
other remote areas of the Soviet Union.

One in four of them died in the
freezing conditions of their transport.

While the Kalmyks and other ethnic
minorities were shipped East,

the German army was being
forced ever Westwards.

Hitler too was searching for someone to blame
for the disastrous way the war was going.

In spring 1944, German troops had even
occupied their own allied Hungary.

Hitler was angry with
the Hungarian leadership,

believing that they lacked
commitment to the war effort.

He particularly blamed Hungarian Jews,

accusing them of corrupting the
rest of the Hungarian people.

I could see the fear
on my parents' faces,

and I could see the whole
atmosphere has changed.

That it's the beginning
of something horrible.

Though we were hoping
this is just something,

a military manoeuvre and the
Jewish population will not be affected.

Hitler was furious that
the Hungarians had not cooperated

with the Nazis Final Solution -
the extermination of the Jews.

All that was to change as during
the spring and summer of 1944

the Nazis organized the most ruthlessly
efficient Jewish deportation

yet seen in occupied Europe.

They knocked on the door and said:
"You've got half an hour

to pack your belongings. Everybody can
take only as much as they can carry."

"And then we'll wait for you
outside in half an hour."

At the same time as
Stalin's secret police

were deporting Soviet
ethnic groups to Siberia,

Hitler's SS were
committing murder here.

440,000 Hungarian Jews were
sent to Auschwitz during 1944,

and only those the Nazis
thought could be used as slaves

were spared immediate death.

The majority of women and children
were murdered within hours of arrival.

I realised within three to four
weeks after arrival at Auschwitz

that there are gas chambers here.
I felt numbness. Numbness.

Numbness. As there is nothing
that I can do about them,

what I have to ensure,
that I should survive,

at least I should be able to
tell the story what happened here.

The Nazis may have managed to deport
Hungarian Jews to the death camps,

but their attempt to shore up
the defence of Hungary was short lived.

By the autumn of 1944,
Red Army troops had entered both Hungary

and another former Nazi ally, Romania.

Many Soviet soldiers decided
that these former allies

of the Nazis owed
them a personal debt.

Fyodor Khropatiy watched as some of
his comrades did more than just steal.

East Prussia,
with its forests and lakes,

was the first part of pre-war German
territory the Red Army entered.

By the beginning of 1945,
almost the whole

of the East Prussian
population was on the move.

Some were trying to escape to the West,

others had been driven out of
their homes by the Red Army.

Anna Seddig and her one
year old son Siegfried

were just two of the thousands of East
Prussian refugees tramping through the cold.

One night, seeking shelter
for herself and her baby,

Anna Seddig encountered
a group of Red Army soldiers.

It is estimated that as many as
two million German women

were raped by Red Army soldiers.

Only a handful of Soviet soldiers were
ever court-martialled for the offence.

But there were those who had
been glad to see the Red Army.

First the population of the
occupied parts of the Soviet Union,

and now the Soviet prisoners of war.

Tatiana Nanieva, who had served
in the Red Army as a nurse,

was one of more than a million
Soviet prisoners of war

who had been transported to camps
within the Greater German Reich

to act as forced labour.

She was overjoyed when the Red Army arrived,
a feeling that was not reciprocated.

Nearly two million Soviet prisoners
of war were liberated by the Red Army.

All were to suffer at the hands of Stalin.
For many like Tatiana Nanieva,

their suffering began here in
a filtration camp run by the secret police.

Their problem was that Stalin
maintained that the Soviet Union

had no prisoners of war,
only traitors.

For the crime of being
captured by the Germans,

volunteer nurse Tatiana Nanieva was
sentenced to six years in the GULAG,

and lifetime exile in Siberia.

In Moscow, renewing the suffering
of the Soviet prisoners of war

was just one of the tasks
Stalin had set himself.

But what obsessed him now, as it
became clear that the Soviet Union

would win the war,
was his own reputation.

The fact that his military
incompetence earlier in the conflict

had nearly lost them
the war had to be erased.

This picture, which still hangs in
the Russian High Command headquarters,

was commissioned by
Stalin after the victory

and shows the Soviet dictator
as he wanted to be seen -

the decisive Generalissimo who
determined the fate of the war.

The truth was that the great victories had
come only after he had allowed his Generals,

particularly Marshal Zhukov,
a freer hand.

But Stalin wanted that
fact too eliminated.

The same month that Zhukov was moved
out of the headquarters in Moscow

and sent to command a whole
army group at the front line,

Stalin was filmed receiving
the Order of Victory,

the highest military
order of the Soviet Union,

a decoration which up to
that point had only ever

been given to high ranking
professional soldiers.

By now, Stalin expected to
receive all the plaudits.

This film shows his reception before
making a speech in the autumn of 1944.

No one wanted to be
the first to stop clapping,

so a mechanical device gave
them all permission to stop.

In Germany, as news from
the front line grew still worse,

these were the sort of images the Nazis'
Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels

preferred the public to see.

Unlike Stalin, who was seen more and more
in Soviet newsreels as the war went on,

Hitler now scarcely
appeared in public at all.

In January 1945, he made a rare
radio broadcast to the German people.

By spring 1945, the situation had
become all but hopeless for the Germans.

The Red Army had
reached the river Oder,

the last great natural
obstacle before Berlin.

At Juterbog airfield near the Oder,

a special group of Luftwaffe
pilots had been assembled.

They wanted to do whatever the could to
stop the Red Army crossing the river.

Among this group of determined
volunteers was Rudolf Escherich.

Rudolf Escherich and twelve of
his comrades signed this letter

proclaiming their willingness to
take part in a suicide mission.

They wrote: "We sacrifice ourselves
voluntarily for our Fuhrer,

our homeland and for Germany."

The plan,
code named Special Mission Freedom,

was to crash their planes into
the bridges over the river Oder.

But the operation was a failure.
Many of the planes,

loaded down with 500-kilogram bombs, were
destroyed before they reached their target,

and others couldn't find
the bridges in thick smoke.

Shortly afterwards, with the Red
Army already across the Oder,

further suicide
missions were abandoned.

The Red Army reached the outskirts
of Berlin on 21st April 1945.

Stalin had encouraged competition
between the two Soviet Marshals

charged with taking Berlin,
Zhukov and Koniev.

But this competition did not make
the operation smoother for the Red Army,

quite the reverse. At the boundary
between the two Soviet armies

there were cases of Red Army soldiers
firing at each other in the confusion.

A week after the assault had begun,
most of Berlin was in Soviet hands.

This Soviet film shows
how one Berlin family

reacted to the arrival
of the Red Army.

The husband appears to have shot his
wife and children before hanging himself.

In the German capital that spring such
stories of suicide were commonplace.

German resistance in Berlin
finally crumbled on May 2nd,

after Zhukov's troops had
stormed the Reichstag.

The British and Americans, having accepted
that the Soviets should take Berlin,

were still more than fifty
miles away to the West.

Hitler had committed suicide in his bunker
rear the Reich Chancellery on April 30th.

One of his last remarks had been that
if the German people lost the war

they would have proved
themselves unworthy of him.

The Red Army now had complete
control of Berlin, Warsaw,

Budapest and Bucharest - nearly
all the capitals of Eastern Europe.

Soviet vengeance did not
stop with final victory.

A few days after the German surrender,

Vladlen Anchishkin was fired
at by retreating SS soldiers.

Having captured them, he and his comrades
embarked on a personal crusade of revenge.

The Soviets held a victory parade
in Red Square on 24th June 1945.

Four years and two days had
passed since Hitler had launched

his invasion of the Soviet Union.

Stalin allowed Zhukov
to inspect the parade.

There was a rumour that Stalin had wanted
to reserve this honour for himself,

but he was worried that he
might fall of his horse.

Within a year of the victory parade,
Zhukov was accused of the crime

of trying to take too much credit
for his part in winning the war.

This order, signed by Stalin as
Generalissimo of the Soviet Union,

accuses Zhukov of being
pretentious and ambitious.

Stalin had him removed to command
the Odessa military district,

700 miles from Moscow.

Zhukov did not suffer alone. The head
of the Navy was arrested and demoted,

and the head of the Air Force
was arrested and tortured.

By the war's end Stalin had extended
his rule into the heart of Europe.

Part of the continent had
exchanged one tyrant for another.

But this was not the only
legacy of the conflict.

Hitler had said that the war in the
East would be a different kind of war,

a war of annihilation.
And in that he was right,

the war he began brought a scale
of atrocity never previously known.

This war would for all
time be a reminder of just

what human beings had been
capable of in the 20th century.