World War II in Colour (2009–…): Season 1, Episode 12 - Victory in Europe - full transcript
[theme music plays]
[background music over dialogue]
[bombs exploding]
[cannon fire]
[woman crying]
[cannon fire]
[narrator] By early
1945, Hitler's Third Reich
was entering its death throes.
In the west, allied forces
had pushed to within
striking distance of the Rhine.
In the east, the Red Army
was crossing
the Polish border into Germany.
[indistinct chatter]
As the Allies battled
their way towards Berlin
from east and west,
the Germans fought them all the way.
[machine gunfire]
But it was a hopeless task.
By May, 1945,
Hitler would be dead
and Germany finally defeated.
February, 1945, and the allied forces
in the west had
assembled near the Rhine for
the final push into Germany.
In the north,
were the amassed ranks of
Field Marshal Bernard
Montgomery's 21st Army Group.
To its south, was General Omar Bradley's
12th Army Group.
It included the U.S. Third Army
commanded by
General George Patton.
[gun firing]
On February the 8th,
Montgomery's Army Group launched
a two-pronged assault on
German forces defending the Rhine.
The northern prong
had to fight its way
through the wooded countryside.
The southern prong was
delayed when the Germans
released water from
a series of dams,
flooding the surrounding area.
It would be over two weeks
before the two prongs met up
on the west bank of the Rhine.
By early March, 1945,
Montgomery's forces
were in control
of some 60 miles of
the west bank of the river.
The next task was to cross it.
[explosion]
South of Montgomery,
Bradley's armies were also
moving eastward,
looking for a route across the river.
[indistinct chatter]
On March the 7th, 1945,
they reached the Rhine
at Cologne.
But Hitler had ordered
all the bridges to be destroyed.
Then as the U.S. forces
explored further south,
they found one bridge still intact
near the small town of Remagen.
They made a dash for it,
brushing aside
German resistance.
[machine gunfire]
[cannon firing]
Then, just as they
were about to cross it,
there was an explosion.
But against the odds,
the bridge remained standing.
A small group of
Americans raced across it,
desperately cutting any wires
that looked like demolition cables.
U.S. commanders began
to push men across
as fast as possible.
The Allies had at last penetrated
the German heartland.
In Berlin,
news of the capture of the bridge
at Remagen infuriated Hitler.
Five junior officers
were court martialled.
Four were shot.
[background music over dialogue]
In addition, the long-suffering
German commander in the west,
Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt,
was sacked.
[background music over dialogue]
It was the second time
it had happened in less than a year.
He was replaced by
veteran commander,
Field Marshal Albert Kesselring,
who'd been in overall charge
in North Africa and Italy.
[firing]
Over the next week,
the Germans launched desperate
air attacks to try and
destroy the bridge at Remagan.
None of them succeeded.
Then suddenly, on March the 17th,
while combat engineers
were repairing it,
the bridge unexpectedly collapsed.
Twenty-eight men
plunged to their deaths.
The first Allied thrust into Germany
had been blocked.
Meanwhile further north,
Montgomery was preparing
the first full scale
Allied crossing of the Rhine.
[plane engines roaring]
On March the 23rd, 1945,
he launched an aerial bombardment
on German forces defending
the east bank of the river.
Some 200 RAF Lancaster bombers
virtually flattened
the town of Wesel.
Then British commanders
in Buffalo amphibious vehicles crossed.
They met little opposition from
the dazed German defenders.
Other divisions followed.
The crossing lasted all night.
[plane engines roaring]
The following day,
in the largest airborne operation
of the war,
17,000 men of British 6th
and U.S. 17th airborne divisions
were dropped to seize
key positions east of the river.
[background music over dialogue]
They were met by
heavy German anti-aircraft fire.
[cannon firing]
A newsreel report told the story.
[reporter] In a short time,
hundreds of gliders
make their hazardous landings,
their men beginning the fight
as soon as they land.
One glider has its wing shot away
when only 50 feet from the ground.
[explosion]
[narrator] More than half the gliders
were destroyed or
damaged before landing
But within hours,
the paratroopers linked up
with Montgomery's land forces,
and the Allied bridgehead
was secured.
[background music over dialogue]
It should have been,
for the ferociously
competitive Montgomery,
a moment of glory.
But he'd been upstaged.
The night before his great rival,
General Patton,
had unexpectedly crossed
the Rhine near Oppenheim
and had already entered Germany.
It was a sign of
the intense rivalry between
Montgomery and American
commanders as they competed
to be the first into Germany.
Over the next few days there
were more Allied crossings.
German defences along
the Rhine collapsed.
In the north, Montgomery now
pushed deeper into Germany,
towards Munster.
In the south, Bradley's forces,
including Patton's Third Army,
pushed east
towards Marburg and Lauterbach.
The major German city
of Frankfurt am Main
were circled and bypassed.
[gun firing]
Die hard German troops
fought back ferociously.
But by now there was no question
that the Germans were finished.
The only issue was when
they would realise it.
As the western allies battled
their way across west Germany,
Stalin's Red Army in Poland
prepared to launch
a major offensive on
Germany's eastern border.
Hitler's forces in the region
were poorly equipped
and ill prepared
to repel an attack.
Supplies of weapons
had run so low,
they were reduced to using
first World War rifles.
German intelligence estimated
the Red Army's infantry
outnumbered them eleven to one.
The Russians also had vastly
more tanks and artillery.
But the Germans had nothing left.
Hitler's strategic reserve
had already been used up
on the western front.
On January the 12th, 1945,
the Russian offensive began
with the usual artillery barrage.
[cannon firing]
It stretched along
a 300-mile front.
[cannon firing]
A week later,
the Red Army drove into
the devastated remains
of Warsaw.
They then pushed westwards
towards the German border,
300 miles away.
To the south
a second Soviet force
took the Polish town of
Krakow on January the 18th.
As the Soviet forces
now raced westwards
on a broad front across Poland,
they left behind pockets of
German resistance in cities
like Poznan and Breslau.
These would later be mocked up.
[gun firing]
By the end of January,
1945, Soviet troops
had crossed the German border
and reached the River Oder.
The Russians were now just
an hour's drive east of Berlin.
[background music over dialogue]
For the veteran Russian
Commander Georgy Zhukov,
it had been a triumph.
He had travelled 300 miles
in just 14 days.
It was one of the fastest and longest
blitzkrieg advances
in military history.
Zhukov's troops now paused
to catch their breath
and bring up supplies.
They were soon joined by
a second group of Soviet armies
that dug in to their
south on the River Neisse.
Meanwhile, a third Russian
force pinned the remnants
of the German armies
in East Prussia
into the Baltic port of
Konigsberg, Kaliningrad today.
Hitler had appointed
the SS Chief Heinrich Himmler
to command his forces
in the neighbouring region.
It was a sign of how deeply
he had come to distrust
his army generals.
[soldiers marching]
But Himmler had no military
knowledge or experience.
[explosion]
During February, 1945,
troops under Himmler's command
were torn apart
by Russian forces moving west.
This time Hitler
could have sent reserves.
A large force of German
troops still occupied
the Courland Peninsula
in neighbouring Latvia.
But in another bizarre decision,
Hitler refused to allow it
to break out and provide assistance.
[background music over dialogue]
He was still committed
to holding on to land,
his lebensraum,
however irrelevant or wasteful
it might now be.
[background music over dialogue]
It meant some
200,000 German troops
spent the final months
of the war doing nothing.
[indistinct chatter]
The Red Army now prepared
for its final assault on Berlin.
It lay less than 50 miles away.
In Germany the imminent
Soviet invasion caused
mass panic among
the civilian population.
The Russians had seen
first hand the horrors
perpetrated by the Germans
in the Soviet Union.
[fire crackling]
They'd witnessed whole towns
and villages destroyed,
their inhabitants massacred.
[women crying]
They were now very clearly
looking for revenge.
There were horrific tales
of Russian rape, murder and pillage.
[woman crying]
In snow and bitter
sub-zero temperatures,
more than five million German
civilians on the eastern front
fled their homes and
flooded west to seek refuge.
Two million people
were evacuated by sea
from German-held ports
along the Baltic coast.
They were easy pickings
for Soviet submarines.
[explosion]
Twenty-four German passenger
ships were torpedoed.
They included the
cruise liner Wilhelm Gustloff,
which had over 10,000
people on board.
Barely a thousand survived,
the worst loss of life ever
in a single incident at sea.
[background music over dialogue]
Hitler's acting Chief of Staff,
General Heinz Guderian,
now urged the Fuhrer
to bring back any units
that could be spared
from the western front
to defend Berlin.
Hitler agreed and brought back
the elite 6th SS Panzer Army.
But he didn't send it to Berlin,
he sent it to Hungary.
He had become obsessed
with defending Germany's
last remaining source of oil,
the Hungarian oil field
west of Lake Balaton.
[indistinct chatter]
It was an ill-considered decision.
[indistinct chatter]
[explosion]
In Hungary the Panzers
were hopelessly
outnumbered by the Russians.
[explosion]
To make matters worse,
the weather conspired against them.
A sudden thaw turned
the ground into a sea of mud.
For several days
the Panzers struggled
to hold back
the advancing Russians.
But they were steadily
forced back into Austria.
Soon they were drawn
into the defence of Vienna
as the Red Army advanced
towards the Austrian capital.
But 6th SS Panzer Army
was a spent force.
Its commander, SS General Sef Dietrich,
had no illusions.
We call ourselves, he said,
the 6th Panzer Army
because we have only
six Panzers left.
On April the 10th,
the Red Army swept them aside
and took Vienna.
[explosion]
As they did so,
the question now became
who would be
the first to reach Berlin.
Would it be the Red Army
or the Western Allies?
The race for Berlin had become
not just a military,
but a political issue.
[indistinct chatter]
By March 1945,
the Red Army was lined up
along the River Oder awaiting
a final assault on Berlin.
It presented
the Allied military command
in the west with a dilemma.
Berlin was less than 300 miles
from their advanced positions.
Most Allied commanders
wanted to race to the city
to beat the Russians.
But at a conference
a month earlier
in the Black Sea port of Yalta,
the Allied leaders
had divided up Germany
into zones of influence.
[background music over dialogue]
Berlin was firmly inside
the Russian zone.
So Eisenhower was instructed
to tell his commanders
to ignore Berlin and spread out
to take the rest of the country.
[cannon firing]
On April the 1st,
U.S. troops surrounded
the German industrial
cities in the Ruhr.
[machine gunfire]
German soldiers occupying the area
put up a stiff resistance.
[gun firing]
When two weeks
later the area fell,
more than 325,000 troops
were taken prisoner.
It was one of the largest
number of German prisoners
taken in the war so far.
The German Commander,
the diehard Nazi
Field Marshal Walter
Model committed suicide.
Elsewhere in the country
resistance was more patchy,
and General Bradley's armies
stormed across Germany.
By April the 18th, 1945,
the U.S. forces
had punched a corridor
through to the Czech border,
splitting Germany in two.
Meanwhile north of the Ruhr,
Montgomery's Canadian
First Army began
the liberation of Holland.
The Dutch had
suffered horrendously
during the bitter winter
of 1944 1945.
The German occupying force
had deliberately taken supplies
of food and fuel from the country
to use elsewhere.
There had been widespread deaths
from starvation and cold.
The Dutch town of Arnhem
was seized on April the 15th, 1945.
Progress was rapid, and
on the following day the Canadians
had liberated Groningen,
close to the Dutch north coast.
[cheering]
That left a German army
virtually intact,
but surrounded, near Amsterdam.
[gun firing]
Soon afterwards a cease fire
was negotiated.
[indistinct chatter]
Allied aircraft now roared
over the Dutch countryside
dropping food
and medical supplies.
At the same time
the British Second Army,
also under Montgomery's command,
pushed fast across
the north German plain.
Osnabruck fell on April the 4th.
The British were soon
at the German port of Bremen.
Here there was fierce
German resistance.
It took nine days of
house-to-house fighting
before the port was secured.
Two days later
Montgomery's British forces
reached the Elbe at Lauenburg.
As the Allies advanced
across Germany,
they now came across
horrific new evidence
of the Nazi's final solution.
In early April, 1945,
U.S. troops overran
a concentration camp
at Ohrdruf near Weimar
in central Germany.
[background music over dialogue]
[woman crying]
A visibly shocked
General Eisenhower paid a visit.
[background music over dialogue]
The SS had evacuated
most of the prisoners,
but they had left behind
piles of bodies.
Eight days later
British troops overran another
concentration camp
at Belsen, north of Hanover.
Here they discovered
over 70,000 prisoners.
Thousands were already dead.
The remainder were starving
and disease-ridden.
A radio broadcast by the BBC
correspondent Richard Dimbleby
gave the horrific details.
[Richard] I passed through the barrier
and found myself
in the world of a nightmare.
The living lay with their heads
against the corpses,
and around them moved the awful,
ghostly procession
of emaciated, aimless people
with nothing to do
and no hope of life.
Unable to move out of your way,
unable to look
at the terrible
sights around them.
It was as though
they were waiting their turn.
This is what the Germans did.
Let there be no mistake about it,
did deliberately and slowly.
[indistinct chatter]
[narrator] Meanwhile,
far to the south in Italy,
the German front
was also starting to collapse.
The German forces were dug in
across the Apennine Mountains.
Field Marshal Sir Harold Alexander,
the Allied commander
in the Mediterranean,
now launched a spring offensive.
[machine gunfire]
On April the 9th, 1945,
British troops attacked,
pulling German forces
in from along the front.
[explosion]
Five days later, U.S. troops
also moved forward
and swiftly reached
the south bank of the River Po.
The Germans retreated to the north bank.
But Hitler's commander in Italy,
General Heinrich von Vietinghoff,
had no illusions
that he could hold back
the Allied advance for long.
[background music over dialogue]
So he now made
approaches to the Allies,
and on April the 29th surrendered
unconditionally.
[background music over dialogue]
It would take effect
from May the 2nd, 1945.
[indistinct chatter]
This was the first formal
surrender of German forces
anywhere in Europe.
The war was moving swiftly
towards a conclusion.
Back in Germany, American
and Russian forces had by now
met up on the Elbe near Leipzig.
[reporter] The moment
the world has been
awaiting so long, when ally
from west meets ally from east
The meeting was
achieved on April 26th,
when a detachment of
the American 69th Infantry Division
under Major General Reinhardt
was rowed across the Elbe
to the Russians assembled
on the far bank.
[narrator] The stage was set for
the final assault on Berlin.
Hitler was desperate.
He now turned to
the old and very young
for help in defending the city.
His Thousand-Year Reich
was preparing for its final
apocalyptic struggle to survive.
[explosion]
[applause]
On April the 1st, 1945,
Joseph Stalin
summoned his top commanders
to Moscow
to receive their orders
for the capture of Berlin.
Marshal Georgy Zhukov,
Russia's most successful commander,
would make the main
assault from his bridgehead
on the Oder River.
A second group of Soviet
armies under Marshal Ivan Konev
would cross the River Neisse
further south and push
deep into Germany,
bypassing the German capital.
Between them they represented
a massive Soviet force
of over two and a half million men.
They were equipped with 6,000 tanks
and self-propelled guns,
and 40,000 guns, mortars
and rocket launchers.
But the Germans were
never going to make it easy.
The city was defended
by about a million troops.
Many were dug into strong
defensive positions,
particularly along
the Seelow heights,
a steep escarpment arising
out of the Oder Valley
and slap in front of
Zhukov's point of assault.
The defenders were a mixed
bunch of combat veterans,
SS fanatics and
inexperienced conscripts,
some as young as 14,
as well as elderly members
of the Volkssturm,
or People's Army.
By now Hitler had retired
to a bunker
under the Reich's Chancellery
in Berlin.
He was a heavily medicated
and shambling figure
who spent much of his time
issuing increasingly
unrealistic orders
to largely imaginary armies.
[background music over dialogue]
His public appearances
were becoming ever more rare.
[cheering]
But in early March
he was persuaded to visit
some of the troops preparing
to defend the Oder line.
[cheering]
[background music over dialogue]
Later in the same month,
he emerged to inspect
a small group of
Hitler Youth soldiers.
[background music over dialogue]
It was his last ever
appearance before the cameras.
[background music over dialogue]
Then on April the 13th,
1945, the U.S. President,
Franklin Roosevelt,
died of a heart attack.
He had been one of
the architects of the war,
responsible for
throwing America's might
behind the Allied offensive.
The Nazi Propaganda Minister,
Josef Goebbels,
seized on the event to encourage
his increasingly befuddled Fuhrer
to believe
the Allied alliance
would collapse.
A German victory
could still be snatched
from the jaws of defeat.
[explosion]
But any illusions were
rapidly dispelled.
Three days after Roosevelt's death,
Zhukov began his assault
on Berlin.
[explosion]
He had one gun for every
13 feet of the front.
But the German defence
had anticipated
and pulled back
to avoid the bombardment.
As a result, when
Zhukov's infantry advanced
they met unexpectedly
heavy resistance.
[machine gunfire]
Desperate to retrieve the situation,
Zhukov threw in his tanks.
But they, too,
were soon bogged down.
[cannon firing]
Meanwhile to the south,
the assault by Konev's
second group of armies
had gone better.
His troops had crossed
the Neisse River
and were well on their way to their
next obstacle, the River Spree.
Stalin stoked the rivalry
between his two commanders
by authorizing Konev
to swing his tanks north
towards Berlin.
He was only too happy
to see a race to take the city.
[explosion]
After three days of savage fighting,
Zhukov's troops
managed to enter
the eastern suburbs of Berlin.
At the same time
Konev was approaching
the city from the south.
There was desperate
German resistance.
[cannon firing]
But on April the 25th,
the Soviet armies met up,
and the final assault
on Berlin began.
[machine gunfire]
[explosion]
As the fighting moved on
from district to district,
civilians began to emerge
from the cellars.
But the Russians took little notice
of the flags of surrender.
The rape of German women
and girls was widespread.
After three more days of fighting,
the city's remaining defenders
were pinned down in a narrow strip
of central Berlin less
than two miles wide.
[cannon firing]
[machine gunfire]
Every street and
house was contested.
Then on the morning
of April the 30th,
Soviet troops began an assault
on the Reichstag,
the German Parliament building.
[gun firing]
Stalin regarded it
as the symbol of Nazi power.
They were stopped by heavy fire,
so they blasted the building
at point blank range
with heavy artillery.
[cannon firing]
That evening the
Russians stormed it.
Fighting raged
from room to room,
and up and down
corridors and staircases.
It would take four hours
before the red flag
could be hoisted on
one of the towers.
The next morning,
on May the 1st, 1945,
the event was restaged
for the cameras.
[indistinct chatter]
But by then Hitler
was already dead.
On April the 30th,
as fighting raged overhead,
the man whose insane
ambitions had embroiled
the world in war,
laid waste a continent
and led to the extermination
of millions of Jews
took his own life.
[speaks German]
[cheering]
[speaks German]
His long time mistress,
Eva Brown,
who he'd married the day before,
died with him.
[speaks German]
Their partially burned
bodies were buried
in the garden of
the Reich's chancellery.
[explosion]
But the fighting continued.
[background music over dialogue]
Hitler had appointed Grand Admiral
Karl Doenitz his successor,
and for the next few days
the new leadership attempted
to salvage something
from its nation's
cataclysmic defeat.
On May the 1st, 1945,
the day after his death,
German people were
told that their Fuhrer
had fallen in battle.
But they were told
to continue the fight
against the Bolshevik menace.
[cannon firing]
But the German leadership
was falling apart.
In Berlin Joseph Goebbels
and Martin Bormann
tried to negotiate a city wide
cease fire with the Russians.
[indistinct chatter]
But the Russian Commander,
Marshal Zhukov, demanded
unconditional surrender of
all German forces everywhere.
[background music over dialogue]
It was more than Goebbels
and Bormann could deliver.
Fighting in Berlin continued.
[gun firing]
Later that evening,
Goebbels and his wife killed
their six children and then
committed suicide themselves.
That same night
Bormann disappeared.
Eventually in the 1990's,
DNA testing confirmed
that a body found
in Berlin was his.
The next morning
Berlin surrendered.
By mid-afternoon all fighting
in the city had stopped.
Across the country the pace
of the German surrender
now gathered momentum.
The following day
Doenitz sent a delegation
to the British
commanding officer,
Field Marshal Montgomery.
He offered to surrender
all German forces
in northern Germany.
[background music over dialogue]
Montgomery sent a reply saying
he didn't have the authority
to accept a surrender
on behalf of the Americans
or the Russians.
He could only accept the surrender
of those troops fighting him.
Doenitz had no choice but
to agree to Montgomery's terms.
[background music over dialogue]
But that left Germany
still fighting
in the rest of the country.
Doenitz now sent another delegation
to General Eisenhower,
the supreme Allied commander,
to discuss a peace deal
with the west.
But it carefully
avoided any reference
to a surrender to the Russians.
Eisenhower rebuffed him
and insisted that only
the unconditional surrender of
all German forces was acceptable.
[background music over dialogue]
Once again Doenitz
was forced to back down.
At 2:41 in the morning
of May the 7th, 1945,
at Eisenhower's
headquarters in France,
General Alfred Jodl,
Hitler's Chief of Operations
throughout the six years of war
signed a document of
unconditional surrender.
[indistinct chatter]
Eisenhower's Chief of Staff,
Walter Bedell Smith,
signed for the western allies.
General Ivan Susloparov signed
for the Soviet Union.
The only member of the Allies side
not happy with the arrangement
was Stalin.
The Soviet Union had
suffered too much to miss out
on its own humiliation
of the Germans.
So Stalin countermanded
Susloparov and declared
Russia would only accept
a surrender in Berlin.
[background music over dialogue]
It meant that
the following day
Hitler's former Chief of Staff,
Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel,
signed a second surrender
document to satisfy Stalin.
[background music over dialogue]
Marshal Zhukov signed
for the Soviet Union,
with Air Chief Marshal
Sir Arthur Tedder
signing on behalf
of the western allies.
[clapping]
In January, 1943,
the late President Roosevelt
and Premier Churchill
met in Casablanca.
There they pronounced
the formula
of unconditional surrender
for the Axis powers.
In Europe that formula
has now been fulfilled.
[music and cheering]
[narrator] Across Europe
and the United States
crowds began to celebrate
the end of the war in Europe.
[cheering]
[cheering]
From now on, the day after
the German surrender,
May the 8th,
would be known as VE Day,
Victory in Europe.
[cheering]
But as the celebrations continued,
many were aware of
two very sobering issues.
In the east,
Japan was still fighting.
[gun firing]
[explosion]
And in Europe
the continent lay in ruins,
and huge problems
needed to be solved.
[indistinct chatter]
Millions of Germany's
concentration camp victims
and slave labourers would need
help to rebuild their lives.
Millions of captured German
fighting men
had to be screened before
being allowed to go home
to identify and arrest
major war criminals.
[background music over dialogue]
The SS was a particular target.
It had been responsible for
some of the worst atrocities
of the war.
Leading Nazis
like Hermann Goering,
head of Hitler's Air Force,
were rounded up
and paraded
in front of the cameras.
Other top Nazis arrested
included civilian leaders like
Albert Speer, and military
leaders like Yodl and Doenitz.
They would be put on trial in
the German city of Nuremberg
for crimes against humanity.
[judge] You must
plead guilty or not guilty.
[speaks German]
[judge] Rudolph Hess, you must plead
guilty or not guilty.
[speaks German]
[judge] That will be entered as
a plea of not guilty.
[narrator] The Nazi leadership
received sentences
ranging from the death penalty
to ten years in prison.
Goering committed suicide
before he could be hung.
Two months after the German surrender,
the Allies met
in the Berlin suburb of Potsdam.
Germany was divided into
four zones of occupation,
Soviet, British,
American and French.
Berlin, although deep
in the Soviet zone,
was parcelled up between
the Allies in the same way.
[indistinct chatter]
The peoples of Europe would
also find themselves divided.
Some would now live under
the control the western allies,
some under Communist Russia.
[background music over dialogue]
But before any of
this could be faced,
there was still the war
in the Pacific to be won.
[heavy gunfire]
[background music over dialogue]
[bombs exploding]
[cannon fire]
[woman crying]
[cannon fire]
[narrator] By early
1945, Hitler's Third Reich
was entering its death throes.
In the west, allied forces
had pushed to within
striking distance of the Rhine.
In the east, the Red Army
was crossing
the Polish border into Germany.
[indistinct chatter]
As the Allies battled
their way towards Berlin
from east and west,
the Germans fought them all the way.
[machine gunfire]
But it was a hopeless task.
By May, 1945,
Hitler would be dead
and Germany finally defeated.
February, 1945, and the allied forces
in the west had
assembled near the Rhine for
the final push into Germany.
In the north,
were the amassed ranks of
Field Marshal Bernard
Montgomery's 21st Army Group.
To its south, was General Omar Bradley's
12th Army Group.
It included the U.S. Third Army
commanded by
General George Patton.
[gun firing]
On February the 8th,
Montgomery's Army Group launched
a two-pronged assault on
German forces defending the Rhine.
The northern prong
had to fight its way
through the wooded countryside.
The southern prong was
delayed when the Germans
released water from
a series of dams,
flooding the surrounding area.
It would be over two weeks
before the two prongs met up
on the west bank of the Rhine.
By early March, 1945,
Montgomery's forces
were in control
of some 60 miles of
the west bank of the river.
The next task was to cross it.
[explosion]
South of Montgomery,
Bradley's armies were also
moving eastward,
looking for a route across the river.
[indistinct chatter]
On March the 7th, 1945,
they reached the Rhine
at Cologne.
But Hitler had ordered
all the bridges to be destroyed.
Then as the U.S. forces
explored further south,
they found one bridge still intact
near the small town of Remagen.
They made a dash for it,
brushing aside
German resistance.
[machine gunfire]
[cannon firing]
Then, just as they
were about to cross it,
there was an explosion.
But against the odds,
the bridge remained standing.
A small group of
Americans raced across it,
desperately cutting any wires
that looked like demolition cables.
U.S. commanders began
to push men across
as fast as possible.
The Allies had at last penetrated
the German heartland.
In Berlin,
news of the capture of the bridge
at Remagen infuriated Hitler.
Five junior officers
were court martialled.
Four were shot.
[background music over dialogue]
In addition, the long-suffering
German commander in the west,
Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt,
was sacked.
[background music over dialogue]
It was the second time
it had happened in less than a year.
He was replaced by
veteran commander,
Field Marshal Albert Kesselring,
who'd been in overall charge
in North Africa and Italy.
[firing]
Over the next week,
the Germans launched desperate
air attacks to try and
destroy the bridge at Remagan.
None of them succeeded.
Then suddenly, on March the 17th,
while combat engineers
were repairing it,
the bridge unexpectedly collapsed.
Twenty-eight men
plunged to their deaths.
The first Allied thrust into Germany
had been blocked.
Meanwhile further north,
Montgomery was preparing
the first full scale
Allied crossing of the Rhine.
[plane engines roaring]
On March the 23rd, 1945,
he launched an aerial bombardment
on German forces defending
the east bank of the river.
Some 200 RAF Lancaster bombers
virtually flattened
the town of Wesel.
Then British commanders
in Buffalo amphibious vehicles crossed.
They met little opposition from
the dazed German defenders.
Other divisions followed.
The crossing lasted all night.
[plane engines roaring]
The following day,
in the largest airborne operation
of the war,
17,000 men of British 6th
and U.S. 17th airborne divisions
were dropped to seize
key positions east of the river.
[background music over dialogue]
They were met by
heavy German anti-aircraft fire.
[cannon firing]
A newsreel report told the story.
[reporter] In a short time,
hundreds of gliders
make their hazardous landings,
their men beginning the fight
as soon as they land.
One glider has its wing shot away
when only 50 feet from the ground.
[explosion]
[narrator] More than half the gliders
were destroyed or
damaged before landing
But within hours,
the paratroopers linked up
with Montgomery's land forces,
and the Allied bridgehead
was secured.
[background music over dialogue]
It should have been,
for the ferociously
competitive Montgomery,
a moment of glory.
But he'd been upstaged.
The night before his great rival,
General Patton,
had unexpectedly crossed
the Rhine near Oppenheim
and had already entered Germany.
It was a sign of
the intense rivalry between
Montgomery and American
commanders as they competed
to be the first into Germany.
Over the next few days there
were more Allied crossings.
German defences along
the Rhine collapsed.
In the north, Montgomery now
pushed deeper into Germany,
towards Munster.
In the south, Bradley's forces,
including Patton's Third Army,
pushed east
towards Marburg and Lauterbach.
The major German city
of Frankfurt am Main
were circled and bypassed.
[gun firing]
Die hard German troops
fought back ferociously.
But by now there was no question
that the Germans were finished.
The only issue was when
they would realise it.
As the western allies battled
their way across west Germany,
Stalin's Red Army in Poland
prepared to launch
a major offensive on
Germany's eastern border.
Hitler's forces in the region
were poorly equipped
and ill prepared
to repel an attack.
Supplies of weapons
had run so low,
they were reduced to using
first World War rifles.
German intelligence estimated
the Red Army's infantry
outnumbered them eleven to one.
The Russians also had vastly
more tanks and artillery.
But the Germans had nothing left.
Hitler's strategic reserve
had already been used up
on the western front.
On January the 12th, 1945,
the Russian offensive began
with the usual artillery barrage.
[cannon firing]
It stretched along
a 300-mile front.
[cannon firing]
A week later,
the Red Army drove into
the devastated remains
of Warsaw.
They then pushed westwards
towards the German border,
300 miles away.
To the south
a second Soviet force
took the Polish town of
Krakow on January the 18th.
As the Soviet forces
now raced westwards
on a broad front across Poland,
they left behind pockets of
German resistance in cities
like Poznan and Breslau.
These would later be mocked up.
[gun firing]
By the end of January,
1945, Soviet troops
had crossed the German border
and reached the River Oder.
The Russians were now just
an hour's drive east of Berlin.
[background music over dialogue]
For the veteran Russian
Commander Georgy Zhukov,
it had been a triumph.
He had travelled 300 miles
in just 14 days.
It was one of the fastest and longest
blitzkrieg advances
in military history.
Zhukov's troops now paused
to catch their breath
and bring up supplies.
They were soon joined by
a second group of Soviet armies
that dug in to their
south on the River Neisse.
Meanwhile, a third Russian
force pinned the remnants
of the German armies
in East Prussia
into the Baltic port of
Konigsberg, Kaliningrad today.
Hitler had appointed
the SS Chief Heinrich Himmler
to command his forces
in the neighbouring region.
It was a sign of how deeply
he had come to distrust
his army generals.
[soldiers marching]
But Himmler had no military
knowledge or experience.
[explosion]
During February, 1945,
troops under Himmler's command
were torn apart
by Russian forces moving west.
This time Hitler
could have sent reserves.
A large force of German
troops still occupied
the Courland Peninsula
in neighbouring Latvia.
But in another bizarre decision,
Hitler refused to allow it
to break out and provide assistance.
[background music over dialogue]
He was still committed
to holding on to land,
his lebensraum,
however irrelevant or wasteful
it might now be.
[background music over dialogue]
It meant some
200,000 German troops
spent the final months
of the war doing nothing.
[indistinct chatter]
The Red Army now prepared
for its final assault on Berlin.
It lay less than 50 miles away.
In Germany the imminent
Soviet invasion caused
mass panic among
the civilian population.
The Russians had seen
first hand the horrors
perpetrated by the Germans
in the Soviet Union.
[fire crackling]
They'd witnessed whole towns
and villages destroyed,
their inhabitants massacred.
[women crying]
They were now very clearly
looking for revenge.
There were horrific tales
of Russian rape, murder and pillage.
[woman crying]
In snow and bitter
sub-zero temperatures,
more than five million German
civilians on the eastern front
fled their homes and
flooded west to seek refuge.
Two million people
were evacuated by sea
from German-held ports
along the Baltic coast.
They were easy pickings
for Soviet submarines.
[explosion]
Twenty-four German passenger
ships were torpedoed.
They included the
cruise liner Wilhelm Gustloff,
which had over 10,000
people on board.
Barely a thousand survived,
the worst loss of life ever
in a single incident at sea.
[background music over dialogue]
Hitler's acting Chief of Staff,
General Heinz Guderian,
now urged the Fuhrer
to bring back any units
that could be spared
from the western front
to defend Berlin.
Hitler agreed and brought back
the elite 6th SS Panzer Army.
But he didn't send it to Berlin,
he sent it to Hungary.
He had become obsessed
with defending Germany's
last remaining source of oil,
the Hungarian oil field
west of Lake Balaton.
[indistinct chatter]
It was an ill-considered decision.
[indistinct chatter]
[explosion]
In Hungary the Panzers
were hopelessly
outnumbered by the Russians.
[explosion]
To make matters worse,
the weather conspired against them.
A sudden thaw turned
the ground into a sea of mud.
For several days
the Panzers struggled
to hold back
the advancing Russians.
But they were steadily
forced back into Austria.
Soon they were drawn
into the defence of Vienna
as the Red Army advanced
towards the Austrian capital.
But 6th SS Panzer Army
was a spent force.
Its commander, SS General Sef Dietrich,
had no illusions.
We call ourselves, he said,
the 6th Panzer Army
because we have only
six Panzers left.
On April the 10th,
the Red Army swept them aside
and took Vienna.
[explosion]
As they did so,
the question now became
who would be
the first to reach Berlin.
Would it be the Red Army
or the Western Allies?
The race for Berlin had become
not just a military,
but a political issue.
[indistinct chatter]
By March 1945,
the Red Army was lined up
along the River Oder awaiting
a final assault on Berlin.
It presented
the Allied military command
in the west with a dilemma.
Berlin was less than 300 miles
from their advanced positions.
Most Allied commanders
wanted to race to the city
to beat the Russians.
But at a conference
a month earlier
in the Black Sea port of Yalta,
the Allied leaders
had divided up Germany
into zones of influence.
[background music over dialogue]
Berlin was firmly inside
the Russian zone.
So Eisenhower was instructed
to tell his commanders
to ignore Berlin and spread out
to take the rest of the country.
[cannon firing]
On April the 1st,
U.S. troops surrounded
the German industrial
cities in the Ruhr.
[machine gunfire]
German soldiers occupying the area
put up a stiff resistance.
[gun firing]
When two weeks
later the area fell,
more than 325,000 troops
were taken prisoner.
It was one of the largest
number of German prisoners
taken in the war so far.
The German Commander,
the diehard Nazi
Field Marshal Walter
Model committed suicide.
Elsewhere in the country
resistance was more patchy,
and General Bradley's armies
stormed across Germany.
By April the 18th, 1945,
the U.S. forces
had punched a corridor
through to the Czech border,
splitting Germany in two.
Meanwhile north of the Ruhr,
Montgomery's Canadian
First Army began
the liberation of Holland.
The Dutch had
suffered horrendously
during the bitter winter
of 1944 1945.
The German occupying force
had deliberately taken supplies
of food and fuel from the country
to use elsewhere.
There had been widespread deaths
from starvation and cold.
The Dutch town of Arnhem
was seized on April the 15th, 1945.
Progress was rapid, and
on the following day the Canadians
had liberated Groningen,
close to the Dutch north coast.
[cheering]
That left a German army
virtually intact,
but surrounded, near Amsterdam.
[gun firing]
Soon afterwards a cease fire
was negotiated.
[indistinct chatter]
Allied aircraft now roared
over the Dutch countryside
dropping food
and medical supplies.
At the same time
the British Second Army,
also under Montgomery's command,
pushed fast across
the north German plain.
Osnabruck fell on April the 4th.
The British were soon
at the German port of Bremen.
Here there was fierce
German resistance.
It took nine days of
house-to-house fighting
before the port was secured.
Two days later
Montgomery's British forces
reached the Elbe at Lauenburg.
As the Allies advanced
across Germany,
they now came across
horrific new evidence
of the Nazi's final solution.
In early April, 1945,
U.S. troops overran
a concentration camp
at Ohrdruf near Weimar
in central Germany.
[background music over dialogue]
[woman crying]
A visibly shocked
General Eisenhower paid a visit.
[background music over dialogue]
The SS had evacuated
most of the prisoners,
but they had left behind
piles of bodies.
Eight days later
British troops overran another
concentration camp
at Belsen, north of Hanover.
Here they discovered
over 70,000 prisoners.
Thousands were already dead.
The remainder were starving
and disease-ridden.
A radio broadcast by the BBC
correspondent Richard Dimbleby
gave the horrific details.
[Richard] I passed through the barrier
and found myself
in the world of a nightmare.
The living lay with their heads
against the corpses,
and around them moved the awful,
ghostly procession
of emaciated, aimless people
with nothing to do
and no hope of life.
Unable to move out of your way,
unable to look
at the terrible
sights around them.
It was as though
they were waiting their turn.
This is what the Germans did.
Let there be no mistake about it,
did deliberately and slowly.
[indistinct chatter]
[narrator] Meanwhile,
far to the south in Italy,
the German front
was also starting to collapse.
The German forces were dug in
across the Apennine Mountains.
Field Marshal Sir Harold Alexander,
the Allied commander
in the Mediterranean,
now launched a spring offensive.
[machine gunfire]
On April the 9th, 1945,
British troops attacked,
pulling German forces
in from along the front.
[explosion]
Five days later, U.S. troops
also moved forward
and swiftly reached
the south bank of the River Po.
The Germans retreated to the north bank.
But Hitler's commander in Italy,
General Heinrich von Vietinghoff,
had no illusions
that he could hold back
the Allied advance for long.
[background music over dialogue]
So he now made
approaches to the Allies,
and on April the 29th surrendered
unconditionally.
[background music over dialogue]
It would take effect
from May the 2nd, 1945.
[indistinct chatter]
This was the first formal
surrender of German forces
anywhere in Europe.
The war was moving swiftly
towards a conclusion.
Back in Germany, American
and Russian forces had by now
met up on the Elbe near Leipzig.
[reporter] The moment
the world has been
awaiting so long, when ally
from west meets ally from east
The meeting was
achieved on April 26th,
when a detachment of
the American 69th Infantry Division
under Major General Reinhardt
was rowed across the Elbe
to the Russians assembled
on the far bank.
[narrator] The stage was set for
the final assault on Berlin.
Hitler was desperate.
He now turned to
the old and very young
for help in defending the city.
His Thousand-Year Reich
was preparing for its final
apocalyptic struggle to survive.
[explosion]
[applause]
On April the 1st, 1945,
Joseph Stalin
summoned his top commanders
to Moscow
to receive their orders
for the capture of Berlin.
Marshal Georgy Zhukov,
Russia's most successful commander,
would make the main
assault from his bridgehead
on the Oder River.
A second group of Soviet
armies under Marshal Ivan Konev
would cross the River Neisse
further south and push
deep into Germany,
bypassing the German capital.
Between them they represented
a massive Soviet force
of over two and a half million men.
They were equipped with 6,000 tanks
and self-propelled guns,
and 40,000 guns, mortars
and rocket launchers.
But the Germans were
never going to make it easy.
The city was defended
by about a million troops.
Many were dug into strong
defensive positions,
particularly along
the Seelow heights,
a steep escarpment arising
out of the Oder Valley
and slap in front of
Zhukov's point of assault.
The defenders were a mixed
bunch of combat veterans,
SS fanatics and
inexperienced conscripts,
some as young as 14,
as well as elderly members
of the Volkssturm,
or People's Army.
By now Hitler had retired
to a bunker
under the Reich's Chancellery
in Berlin.
He was a heavily medicated
and shambling figure
who spent much of his time
issuing increasingly
unrealistic orders
to largely imaginary armies.
[background music over dialogue]
His public appearances
were becoming ever more rare.
[cheering]
But in early March
he was persuaded to visit
some of the troops preparing
to defend the Oder line.
[cheering]
[background music over dialogue]
Later in the same month,
he emerged to inspect
a small group of
Hitler Youth soldiers.
[background music over dialogue]
It was his last ever
appearance before the cameras.
[background music over dialogue]
Then on April the 13th,
1945, the U.S. President,
Franklin Roosevelt,
died of a heart attack.
He had been one of
the architects of the war,
responsible for
throwing America's might
behind the Allied offensive.
The Nazi Propaganda Minister,
Josef Goebbels,
seized on the event to encourage
his increasingly befuddled Fuhrer
to believe
the Allied alliance
would collapse.
A German victory
could still be snatched
from the jaws of defeat.
[explosion]
But any illusions were
rapidly dispelled.
Three days after Roosevelt's death,
Zhukov began his assault
on Berlin.
[explosion]
He had one gun for every
13 feet of the front.
But the German defence
had anticipated
and pulled back
to avoid the bombardment.
As a result, when
Zhukov's infantry advanced
they met unexpectedly
heavy resistance.
[machine gunfire]
Desperate to retrieve the situation,
Zhukov threw in his tanks.
But they, too,
were soon bogged down.
[cannon firing]
Meanwhile to the south,
the assault by Konev's
second group of armies
had gone better.
His troops had crossed
the Neisse River
and were well on their way to their
next obstacle, the River Spree.
Stalin stoked the rivalry
between his two commanders
by authorizing Konev
to swing his tanks north
towards Berlin.
He was only too happy
to see a race to take the city.
[explosion]
After three days of savage fighting,
Zhukov's troops
managed to enter
the eastern suburbs of Berlin.
At the same time
Konev was approaching
the city from the south.
There was desperate
German resistance.
[cannon firing]
But on April the 25th,
the Soviet armies met up,
and the final assault
on Berlin began.
[machine gunfire]
[explosion]
As the fighting moved on
from district to district,
civilians began to emerge
from the cellars.
But the Russians took little notice
of the flags of surrender.
The rape of German women
and girls was widespread.
After three more days of fighting,
the city's remaining defenders
were pinned down in a narrow strip
of central Berlin less
than two miles wide.
[cannon firing]
[machine gunfire]
Every street and
house was contested.
Then on the morning
of April the 30th,
Soviet troops began an assault
on the Reichstag,
the German Parliament building.
[gun firing]
Stalin regarded it
as the symbol of Nazi power.
They were stopped by heavy fire,
so they blasted the building
at point blank range
with heavy artillery.
[cannon firing]
That evening the
Russians stormed it.
Fighting raged
from room to room,
and up and down
corridors and staircases.
It would take four hours
before the red flag
could be hoisted on
one of the towers.
The next morning,
on May the 1st, 1945,
the event was restaged
for the cameras.
[indistinct chatter]
But by then Hitler
was already dead.
On April the 30th,
as fighting raged overhead,
the man whose insane
ambitions had embroiled
the world in war,
laid waste a continent
and led to the extermination
of millions of Jews
took his own life.
[speaks German]
[cheering]
[speaks German]
His long time mistress,
Eva Brown,
who he'd married the day before,
died with him.
[speaks German]
Their partially burned
bodies were buried
in the garden of
the Reich's chancellery.
[explosion]
But the fighting continued.
[background music over dialogue]
Hitler had appointed Grand Admiral
Karl Doenitz his successor,
and for the next few days
the new leadership attempted
to salvage something
from its nation's
cataclysmic defeat.
On May the 1st, 1945,
the day after his death,
German people were
told that their Fuhrer
had fallen in battle.
But they were told
to continue the fight
against the Bolshevik menace.
[cannon firing]
But the German leadership
was falling apart.
In Berlin Joseph Goebbels
and Martin Bormann
tried to negotiate a city wide
cease fire with the Russians.
[indistinct chatter]
But the Russian Commander,
Marshal Zhukov, demanded
unconditional surrender of
all German forces everywhere.
[background music over dialogue]
It was more than Goebbels
and Bormann could deliver.
Fighting in Berlin continued.
[gun firing]
Later that evening,
Goebbels and his wife killed
their six children and then
committed suicide themselves.
That same night
Bormann disappeared.
Eventually in the 1990's,
DNA testing confirmed
that a body found
in Berlin was his.
The next morning
Berlin surrendered.
By mid-afternoon all fighting
in the city had stopped.
Across the country the pace
of the German surrender
now gathered momentum.
The following day
Doenitz sent a delegation
to the British
commanding officer,
Field Marshal Montgomery.
He offered to surrender
all German forces
in northern Germany.
[background music over dialogue]
Montgomery sent a reply saying
he didn't have the authority
to accept a surrender
on behalf of the Americans
or the Russians.
He could only accept the surrender
of those troops fighting him.
Doenitz had no choice but
to agree to Montgomery's terms.
[background music over dialogue]
But that left Germany
still fighting
in the rest of the country.
Doenitz now sent another delegation
to General Eisenhower,
the supreme Allied commander,
to discuss a peace deal
with the west.
But it carefully
avoided any reference
to a surrender to the Russians.
Eisenhower rebuffed him
and insisted that only
the unconditional surrender of
all German forces was acceptable.
[background music over dialogue]
Once again Doenitz
was forced to back down.
At 2:41 in the morning
of May the 7th, 1945,
at Eisenhower's
headquarters in France,
General Alfred Jodl,
Hitler's Chief of Operations
throughout the six years of war
signed a document of
unconditional surrender.
[indistinct chatter]
Eisenhower's Chief of Staff,
Walter Bedell Smith,
signed for the western allies.
General Ivan Susloparov signed
for the Soviet Union.
The only member of the Allies side
not happy with the arrangement
was Stalin.
The Soviet Union had
suffered too much to miss out
on its own humiliation
of the Germans.
So Stalin countermanded
Susloparov and declared
Russia would only accept
a surrender in Berlin.
[background music over dialogue]
It meant that
the following day
Hitler's former Chief of Staff,
Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel,
signed a second surrender
document to satisfy Stalin.
[background music over dialogue]
Marshal Zhukov signed
for the Soviet Union,
with Air Chief Marshal
Sir Arthur Tedder
signing on behalf
of the western allies.
[clapping]
In January, 1943,
the late President Roosevelt
and Premier Churchill
met in Casablanca.
There they pronounced
the formula
of unconditional surrender
for the Axis powers.
In Europe that formula
has now been fulfilled.
[music and cheering]
[narrator] Across Europe
and the United States
crowds began to celebrate
the end of the war in Europe.
[cheering]
[cheering]
From now on, the day after
the German surrender,
May the 8th,
would be known as VE Day,
Victory in Europe.
[cheering]
But as the celebrations continued,
many were aware of
two very sobering issues.
In the east,
Japan was still fighting.
[gun firing]
[explosion]
And in Europe
the continent lay in ruins,
and huge problems
needed to be solved.
[indistinct chatter]
Millions of Germany's
concentration camp victims
and slave labourers would need
help to rebuild their lives.
Millions of captured German
fighting men
had to be screened before
being allowed to go home
to identify and arrest
major war criminals.
[background music over dialogue]
The SS was a particular target.
It had been responsible for
some of the worst atrocities
of the war.
Leading Nazis
like Hermann Goering,
head of Hitler's Air Force,
were rounded up
and paraded
in front of the cameras.
Other top Nazis arrested
included civilian leaders like
Albert Speer, and military
leaders like Yodl and Doenitz.
They would be put on trial in
the German city of Nuremberg
for crimes against humanity.
[judge] You must
plead guilty or not guilty.
[speaks German]
[judge] Rudolph Hess, you must plead
guilty or not guilty.
[speaks German]
[judge] That will be entered as
a plea of not guilty.
[narrator] The Nazi leadership
received sentences
ranging from the death penalty
to ten years in prison.
Goering committed suicide
before he could be hung.
Two months after the German surrender,
the Allies met
in the Berlin suburb of Potsdam.
Germany was divided into
four zones of occupation,
Soviet, British,
American and French.
Berlin, although deep
in the Soviet zone,
was parcelled up between
the Allies in the same way.
[indistinct chatter]
The peoples of Europe would
also find themselves divided.
Some would now live under
the control the western allies,
some under Communist Russia.
[background music over dialogue]
But before any of
this could be faced,
there was still the war
in the Pacific to be won.
[heavy gunfire]